MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2019

Peter Jackson Wrestling Fifty-Five Hours Of Unseen Footage and 140 Hours Of Audio To Make A Movie About Creating “Let It Be.” 

PAPER Is On It: “Why Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap Might Be the Most Important Doc of 2019″

“Google employees can no longer use their internal smartphone apps that run on Apple’s iOS, following a decision by Apple the company broke its rules”

“How do you make a movie about a horrible person without becoming a vessel by which he can broadcast his horrible ideas?”
Bilge Ebiri On Alison Klayman’s The Brink

“The biggest change is just the endurance to do a 16-hour movie in the case of ‘Too Old To Die Young.’ It’s ten episodes around 90 minutes apiece. I warned Nic Winding Refn, you better drink a lot of coffee and get a lot of sleep. ‘Too Old To Die Young’ has gone on for a year; for me the challenge has been to not get burned out and jaded and complacent, but to stay engaged and focused for that much time.”
Composer Cliff Martinez On His Three-Decade Career

variety

“The marketplace for collecting entertainment content was very small when Ultraviolet started. It was siloed into walled gardens at the time.”
Ultraviolet “Movie Locker” Deep-Sixed

deadline

“We tested and retested the film — with audiences and critics alike — and the data demonstrated that the film was not going to be able to perform at our initial expectations, so we adjusted our budget and marketing tactics accordingly. Regardless of the spend, it’s next to impossible for an adult-skewing drama to overcome a 23% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a D+ CinemaScore. To have spent more would have been irresponsible to our capital partners and wouldn’t have made prudent business sense for an independent distributor. “
Stars Displeased With Distributor Failing To Put Cash Dollars Behind Serenity

NY Times

“I believe that art in the face of censorship is like water in the face of a stone. The water will find a way to flow around it.”
Asghar Farhadi In The NYT Magazine

indie wire

Anne Thompson Tots Up The Park City Millions

Jerry Saltz On Jake Gyllenhaal and “Velvet Buzzsaw”

hollywoodreporter.com

“I have got a reason why I doubt that he has done it.”
Avi Lerner Avers All Of Hollywood Gets Behind His Bryan Singer Hire

”Instead of apologizing for the show’s length, the academy should resolve to pack the Oscar broadcast full of major moments, no matter how long it goes. Instead of antagonizing the craftspeople who should be celebrating the biggest night of their careers, the Oscars should find a way to honor them by making every presentation a blockbuster event.”

Glenn Kenny: “An early, unsuccessful, attempt at #MeToo in Hollywood”

deadline

“I don’t think anybody knows. It’s not going away. When things take off theatrically, there’s no real equivalent in any other revenue stream. When a movie really blows up, you can’t duplicate that on a platform. Everything. The cultural real estate that it takes up. The money that it brings in. If you are somebody who works for a streaming platform and feel that theatrical is dead or is dying I would say to you, oh, really? Why don’t you tell that to the makers of Get Out, who in a typical streaming deal would have gotten somewhere in the teens for that movie. And that would be it, for the rest of their lives. Don’t tell me that there isn’t a business out there. The question becomes, what’s working theatrically? So that’s the more relevant question for me as a filmmaker. What’s working? I tried to test a few theories of mine about wide-release movies. In retrospect, I think the studios were right about everything.”

Good Dr, Bordwell Extends His Remarks on Christopher Nolan, As Well As A Kerfuffle With Another Film Cricket

hollywoodreporter.com

“I built my name on two people talking in a room. And I still believe in the power of something seemingly so small as two people talking in a room. I still think that is how everything begins. You can look at the largest global narrative that you can find, and you can trace it back at some point to two people in a room.”
Steven Soderbergh

hollywoodreporter.com

Minhal Baig’s Hala Appeals To Apple

hollywoodreporter.com

Amazon Flows $14 Million To Scott Z. Burns’ Starry The Report, Depicting Bush-Cheney Torture Program

NY Times

Original Mary Poppins Called Out For Blackface, As Well As A Convoluted Allusion In Mary Poppins Returns

“There’s something about advertising on an Instagram account that got successful for posting stolen jokes—and spending ad money to run sponsored posts stylized like stolen jokes, no less—that feels antithetical to everything Comedy Central stands for.”
“Comedy Central Is Advertising With Every Comedian’s Worst Enemy”

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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