MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2018

NY Times

“We want to maintain the level of excellence. At the same time, we do want to widen the aperture a little bit.”

deadline

Behind New Amazon Studios Movie Strategy

 Longtime Chief Creative at DC Entertainment Steps Down

Toni Collette: “I don’t like horror films – I’m too petrified”

hollywoodreporter.com

De Niro Curses! 

Danny Kirwan, 68, Former Fleetwood Mac Guitarist and Songwriter

variety

“The bad grade, in this case, raises a question: Why are so many people turning on Hereditary who’d be all too happy to sit through the limb-severing, soundtrack-gonging, ghost-face-in-the-mirror megaplex horror implement of the week? The reason they’ve turned on it, of course, is that it’s not the horror implement of the week.”
Variety Stretches, Yawns, Has a Deep Think, Composes Nearly 1,300-Word Thumbsucker On Hereditary And Tracking Aid CinemaScore

“Overnight Success Takes a Long Time to Happen,” Writes Lorna Tucker, Director of Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

“There is a moment in Ocean’s 8 when Anne Hathaway throws up. Just full-on vomits. Her character, movie star and Met Gala co-chair, is poised and unattainable, but it’s in the moment that she throws up that she becomes the standout character in a film of all-star actresses. The comedy up to that point is all one-liners and snark. But it’s Anne Hathaway’s full-body convulsions in a floor length gown that remind you that while Hathaway isn’t the first to throw up for comedic effect, she might be the funniest person to ever do it. It’s a small moment, but it counts.”

“As an actor, I have periods of intense work and then a break. As you get older, learning lines gets harder, since your brain is slower. I have a little office space at home where I often stare out the window at the bird feeders in the garden.”
Alison Steadman

Morgan Neville on Documenting Fred Rogers’ “Radical Kindness”

“Anthony Bourdain was a modern Mister Rogers, encouraging viewers to expand their horizons”

“The True Man’s World”: The Men of Michael Mann

A Diary Of Two Weeks in the Peruvian Jungle At Werner Herzog’s Filmmaking Workshop

indie wire

Writer David Simon Banned From Twitter for Cursing Trolls With Death By Boils

variety

Greg Berlanti Signs “Massive” Six-Year Renewal With WB TV Valued at $300 Million-Plus

“The Complete Conceptual History of The Millennium Falcon or How I Started Worrying and Lost My Mind Completely Over a Fictional Spaceship Someone Please Do Something Send Help Why Are You Still Reading Someone Do Something”

Horror 2018: a Family Affair

“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger – risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

“Those whisper campaigns where you can anonymously ruin someone’s Hw’d career forever need to stop. Now,” Writes Lexi Alexander

hollywoodreporter.com

John Lasseter Out At Disney and Pixar At End Of Year; Consultant Until Then

Ray Pride Talks To Dan Mirvish About Unearthing Jules Feiffer’s Bernard and Huey

variety

“Three Top 42West Publicists Depart to Start Own Company”

New Yorker Editor David Remnick on Anthony Bourdain 

Anthony Bourdain Was 61

LA Times

“I said, ‘I need a kamikaze performance — I need you to jump off the deep end.'”
Jen Yamato On All the Brains Behind Hereditary

“While Ocean’s 8 is technically a heist movie, it is actually a movie about how men are boring and peripheral and women are fun and should have sex with each other.”

Bus 2525 from Speed Goes For $102,400

“When you tell people about sexual abuse, they think: “Oh my God! It’s so horrible!” Or they have this perception of a person who is sexually abused as someone crying in a corner, and it’s a big drama. For me, as a survivor, it’s not like that. You live with something in a very, again, ordinary way. It’s part of you. I don’t see this event as horrific in the way you see it as horrific. I see it as part of my life, and I’m investigating a narrative in my life, not something from a horror film. So I wanted to show the ordinariness of it all.”
“The Tale”‘s Jennifer Fox

Elisabeth Subrin and Jennifer Fox On The Tale

“European Cinema Embraces the Vagina – What’s Taken Hollywood So Long?” Asks Anne Billson

Original “West Side Story” Cast Member George Marcy Was 87

NY Times

Soviet-Era Film Director Alexander Askoldov, 85, Whose Banned The Commissar Was Rediscovered

hollywoodreporter.com

Ukraine’s Great Director Kira Muratova Was 83

deadline

Eddie Murphy Returns in Rudy Ray Moore Biopic For Netflix

“Good things can come from idiot men saying stupid shit and everyone reacting accordingly.”
Colin Trevorrow

Brit Producers Respond, Largely Anonymously, To BFI Doc Finance Changes

UK Regulators Conditionally Clear Offer For Sky; Murdoch Must Offload Sky News To Get Greenlight; Comcast Buy Of News OK’ed

hollywoodreporter.com

“Stacey Snider Walks Fox Tightrope While Stuck in Disney Limbo”

“It’s time to start financing women and people of color who are directors, producers, and screenwriters with big money—and the rest will follow. Decades of talk have not moved the Hollywood gauge. It’s time for action.”
B. Ruby Rich On Film Quarterly Turning 60

LA Times

“The cancellation came the first day when ‘Roseanne’ writers and other staff had reconvened to plan the second season. Many shows have already staffed up for the upcoming TV season, which could make it difficult for laid-off crew members to find replacement work.”

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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

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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