MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2018

hollywoodreporter.com

“I know Roseanne. And I know Trump. And they are about to rue the day they knew me…”
Via Twitter, Michael Moore Announces He’s Still Relevant

hollywoodreporter.com

Japan PM Snubs Kore-eda

thestar.com

Peter Howell In Praise of Caddyshack, the “Glorious Disaster that Endured”

variety

Slender Man Producers Gamble Sony Pictures Exit

Rachel Kushner On Sharing Sidney J. Furie’s The Leather Boys With Her Parents

“Our main influence was more Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown. The main concentration was getting Donald looking good in the black cape and the yellow shirt, because the story demanded that was gonna be his main costume throughout.  The whole Lando’s closet thing grew. In the end we made around 30 capes for that room, probably around 30 shirts, 20 scarves, lots of footwear and accessories. The general thing was to make it luxurious as possible. All his available money has gone to his clothing.”
Solo Costume Designers Glynn Dillon and Dave Crossman On Dressing Lando And Han

Ed Solomon On Building Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (And A Career) From A Succession Of Failures

“Nobody asked me to do it. I read the papers – I see him on television.”
When Donald Pardoned Dinesh

“The whole point of Bob Iger’s great leap forward was supposed to be that once you had these mega-brands they would sell themselves. Apparently not! Marvel’s incredible winning streak remains the exception. The Rule, which has not been repealed, remains defined by DC, Universal Monsters, etc.: A run continues as long as you keep making great movies people can’t wait to see.  Marvel is having an incredible run, but as is the way of all flesh, it’s two bad movies away from collapse.”
The Ankler Is Skeptical On I. P. Drive

33317733_473863043033782_2600713452049661952_nFor RWF’s 73rd Birthday, Filmmaker Reprints 1997 Remembrances By Everett Lewis, Harmony Korine, Tom Kalin, Lynne Stopkewich, Ira Sachs, Jon Moritsugu, Todd Verow

hollywoodreporter.com

Jason Bateman Says It’s Time He Gets To Play A Woman

“Tambor, on the other hand, has just been repeating the same canned apology he’s been spouting: he’s a guy who gets so deep in his process that he doesn’t realize he’s behaving badly, please excuse him for his commitment to the art, and so forth. It’s – what’s the word? – horseshit. There are plenty of great actors who don’t need to yell at people to make a scene work. Tambor’s good at what he does, but he’d probably be even better if his collaborators weren’t walking around him on eggshells.”

“This is not a time to calm down. David Brooks has no right to tell people who are mad as hell to stop being mad as hell. He can afford to be calm and collected because he is so wealthy and sequestered that nothing truly awful can happen to him. His civility is a luxury. He only wants to talk about this shit in civilized terms because he lives a civilized life. His words are those of a man whose foremost experiences in life have happened inside his own rectum. He deserves to have his ass dragged every time someone hits PUBLISH on his behalf. And so do Weiss, and Stephens, and anyone else who thinks they should get a free pass from people just because they endorse crummy ideas in soft academic language.”
Drew Magary Has Words For The Sainted New York Times Op-Ed Cadres

The Star Child Lives

Sally Field In Defense of That Word

daily beast

White House Openly Demands TBS Cancel Samantha Bee For Offense To White House Advisor

hollywoodreporter.com

Calculating the Cost of Canceling “Roseanne” for Disney

daily beast

Conservative Streaming Service With Russian Partners, Led By Former Trump Aide, Expresses Interest In Roseanne

NY Times

Lawrence Kasdan Reviews His Screenwriting Career For The Times

Salon

“The goal of the rebooted ‘Roseanne’ seemed painfully obvious: Normalize the racism and intolerance of Trump supporters for gain and profit. Within a few minutes of posting my observations, I was inundated with talent from ABC and its parent company Disney, everyone who reached out voicing their disgust with the network’s decision to greenlight the reboot. Several aired their concern that a team of liberal comics had been hired in order to traverse the choppy political waters the show would need to get past if it was going to be a cross-demographic hit. ‘This is as cynical as it gets,’ one person wrote. ‘This is putting makeup and a million-dollar dress on pure, unabashed intolerance.'”

Asia Argento On Directing An Episode Of “Parts Unknown” With Chris Doyle in Hong Kong

Rob Thomas Orders, Eats Denny’s Han Solo Co-Reactor Pancakes (With Pop Rocks on Top)

“The element I was always most sure about was the ending, and I was always working toward that ending. The 28 Days Later model is not the way I choose to work now. To be flat out honest about it — there’s no fucking way I want to be in the position of storyboarding endings and shooting extra bits. That does not appeal to me at all. That’s not a happy place to be for me.”
Alex Garland On Ending Annihilation

Jonnie Rosenbaum Updates “Roman Polanski and The Catastrophe of Public Discourse”

hollywoodreporter.com

“This isn’t liberals curtailing free speech, it’s Americans rejecting hate speech.”
Writes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

“More recent imitators lack all intellectual honesty. They throw dates and place names onto the screen as if what you are about to see is a faithful reproduction of events, when they are simply trying to pass off their fiction as authentic. This is basically a marketing ploy that has developed over the last 20 years or so. Unfortunately, fake authenticity sells.”
Historian Antony Beevor Resents War Movies

hollywoodreporter.com

“I absolutely think this is going to end up in a plea deal because I don’t see the defense as having much shot at being successful.”
Cover-Storying Harvey Weinstein’s Chances In Court

variety

“Not enough has been said about the many men and women who poured their hearts and lives into the show and were just getting started on next season. We’re so sorry they were swept up in all of this and we give thanks for their remarkable talents, wish them well, and hope to find another way to work together down the road.”
Disney/ABC Television Group president Ben Sherwood

hollywoodreporter.com

“We found out first through the press. We weren’t sure if it was accurate. But then we heard from Tom Werner that the show was canceled. We all knew it was a possibility but the suddenness of it was a shock.”
Inside The “Roseanne” Writers Room

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste.”
Roseanne Tweets Some More

Frank Marshall Says Orson Welles’ Completed The Other Side Of The Wind To Get Limited Theatrical

Cinematographer Masaki Tamura, 79, Films Include Eureka, Lady Snowblood, Tampopo, Himatsuri, Crazy Family, Eyes of the Spider

“ABC’s decision to cancel ‘Roseanne’ feels like a gutsy move. It looks like a stand against racism, a line drawn in the sand to delineate what is reasonable and what is not. It even looks like a data point in the ‘How do we separate the art from the artist?’ debate, and it offers a heartening answer: We don’t have to, because, in this case, ABC will not finance that artist. It’s somehow even more heartening because it comes from a massive corporate conglomerate that might lose money by making this decision. It feels remarkably just. It feels decent. I’m thrilled that Roseanne has been canceled. It was the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel correct to hold up ABC as a new bastion of decency, either. ‘Roseanne’ felt like the Titanic, a ship that seemed too big to turn around — but in the aftermath of Barr’s tweet, it also seemed like a ship that was doomed. ABC’s decision to cancel Roseanne is a good thing, but it also seems like a decision to shut down something that was about to implode anyhow. With a little more context, it looks like a network taking a strong stance against racism… in a way that also rids them of a show that was about to fall apart anyhow.”

LA Times

“L.A. region ‘creative economy’ produced 457,400 jobs in 2016, driven by Hw’d rebound”

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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