MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2018

“Jennifer Fox’s powerful new film ‘The Tale’ is a reminder of how many #MeToo narratives have centered on the men accused, rather than the people who have spoken up against them.”

LA Times

“Nobody looks to Hollywood for social commentary, do they? They only recently discovered that there were black people in the world. Hollywood has mistreated women in every possible way throughout its history. Gay men don’t exist.”
Sir Ian McKellen

wsj

“Shari Redstone and Les Moonves are locked in a legal battle triggered by disagreement over a potential merger of Viacom and the broadcasting powerhouse”

clown cried polaroidsMiscellany At Jerry Lewis Auction Includes Continuity Polaroids From “The Day The Clown Cried”

ICM Drops Roseanne

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”
“Roseanne” Canceled After Latest Racist Twitter Rant by Roseanne Barr

LA Times

Morgan Freeman Attorney Demands CNN Retraction

hollywoodreporter.com

“Let’s measure how we feel about this until more time passes. We have a lot of work to do in trying to understand this. We are all over it and will spend a lot of time digging into why things happened the way they did in various markets. We have a year-and-a-half before Episode IX comes out.”

“Knowing the last thing anyone behind a desk at Paramount or any other studio wants to receive is a 120-page script with blocks after blocks of description, we appropriated the sparest writing style possible, cribbing off our heroes like Walter Hill and David Giler’s draft of Alien. We drew pictures into the script. We would literally Photoshop pictures of a Monopoly board for the Monopoly scene in there. We would put in handwriting and newspaper headlines — all these devices that would communicate the future version of the movie that people would see in theaters.”
Communicating A Quiet Place

A Look Behind Chicago’s Millennium Park Summer Movie Series (Attended By As Many As 20,000 Filmgoers), In Cooperation With A Dozen Of That City’s Fifty Or So Annual Film Fests

“I entered cinema with empty hands and lack of knowledge and unsupported, but with love. People ignored our mistakes, and it would be a pity if we do not appreciate them.”
Veteran Iranian Actor Nasser Malakmoti Was 88

B’wd Actress Geeta Kapoor Was 67

hollywoodreporter.com

“Han is an upbeat antihero, but because of the setting and the dark visual palette, it’s hard to find much of what transpires that fun or funny. Howard has worked in different genres, from Westerns to biopics, but there’s a surprising lack of looseness here, either because he hopped onto the production so late in the game or because the script all but dictated it.”
Thumbsuckers Begin In Earnest For Solo‘s Erratic Flight

Vancouver Filmmaker Arvi Liimatainen Was 68

Charlie Rose, Garrison Keillor, Matt Lauer Among Men Eager For Their #MeAgain Moment 

Europe Plans $466 Million Cultural Budget, A Twenty-Seven-Percent Increase

“Harvey Weinstein wore a light blue sweater and a black dinner jacket; his mouth alternated between a grimace and a smirk. Entering the precinct, Weinstein was a spectacle of smugness, as if trying to project the posture of an intellectual dissident. In his hands were three books, two of which have been identified. They were corny totems suggesting, respectively, artistic revolution and false persecution: ‘Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,’ and Richard Schickel’s biography of Elia Kazan, the Hollywood director who famously ‘named names’ to the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1952.”

“First Reformed understands, in rare and terrifying way, the mental toll of feeling like either an exile or a dangerous apostate within one’s faith community, alienated both from a caring God and from the platitudes that seem to satisfy others in the pews — of becoming convinced that if you’re not frightened then you’re purposely shutting yourself off from reality. It knows the special existential terror of trying to pray without being sure that God is listening, in a world where the nonexistence of God seems just as plausible as the alternative.”

LA Times

“Solo writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan on spoilers, sequels and why [SPOILER IN HEADLINE]

The Secrets Of The Texas Theatre (And Historical Byways Of The Projectionist’s Trade)

“For the first time in decades, Hugh Grant is enthusiastically embodying his characters. Maybe this is because he suddenly produced five children in the space of seven years (and is now due to marry the mother of three of them), and realised he had to stop dicking around and earn some money. Or maybe it’s because his once merely handsome face is now more interesting, so he’s getting better parts (a privilege, it has to be said, not afforded to women). Probably it’s a bit of both.”

“Jeffrey Tambor Has Been Canceled — But Not When Trans Women Spoke Up; It was only when cisgender actress Jessica Walter complained that people recognized Jeffrey Tambor’s terrible behavior,” Writes Robyn Kanner

“I just felt extremely emotional today. I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t know why. It should be a day of celebration, but I feel melancholic about it all.”
Paz de la Huerta On Arrest Of Harvey Weinstein on Rape Charges

NY Times

“After Mr. Freeman spoke to a CNN reporter, Chloe Melas, in a way she considered inappropriate, she tracked down other women who said the actor had mistreated them.”

Philip Roth’s Last Reading, From 2014 40 min. 

hollywoodreporter.com

Veteran Rogers & Cowan Publicist, Damage Control Adept Paul Bloch, Was 78

“Helios and Matheson Analytics, which bought MoviePass in August of last year, saw its stock share price close at an all-time low of 41 cents Friday, which represented an 80% plunge in the stock’s value since reports surfaced that the company only had $15.5 million in available cash and $27.9 million on deposit with merchants at the end of April.”

LA Times

“For many of the women who claim that Harvey Weinstein raped, assaulted, groped, sexually harassed, masturbated in front of, inappropriately touched, forcibly kissed, verbally abused, professionally punished, spied on or systemically silenced them, Friday was a long-awaited day…”

deadline

Gary Garfinkel, 55, Co-Head, Content Acquisitions at Showtime Networks

download

James Wong Howe Gets A Doodle

“Netflix needs to keep borrowing as they are investing so much so quickly in content and have to stay ahead, there’s nothing else they can do. They have to stay ahead of Amazon and Apple, and soon Disney. They are at the moment but there are very well-funded, larger, competitors starting to get their act together.”

NY Times

“What we needed to knock out The Village Voice was a great classified, and we simply didn’t have one.”
SoHo Weekly News Founder Michael Goldstein Was 79

Xueli Wang On “Hong Sang-soo’s Dream Time”

“If its ratings don’t really matter, why is Netflix canceling so many shows?”

“The overstimulation of the age of Trump, meanwhile, makes us lose track of time and whatever small sense humans normally have of themselves in history. We forget what happened a month ago. If we look away for a day, we miss news that seem momentous to others—only to be forgotten, too, in a week. Living in a shared reality with our fellow-citizens is an endless triathlon of reading, talking, and panicking. It creates the worst possible frame of mind for answering vexing moral questions.”
Masha Gessen 

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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