MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2019

“Recollecting a brief youthful encounter with Joseph H. Lewis, as Blu-rays of My Name is Julia Ross and So Dark The Night are released”

Hello, Oscar!
Glenn Close Set For Rob Ashford “Sunset Blvd.” Musical

hollywoodreporter.com

“I love the restaurant, the booths on the old side. It’s the real-deal Hollywood. The first time I went might’ve been in the ’70s. It’s true that I ate with Mark Frost in maybe 2012. That lunch at Musso’s started the 18 hours of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return.'”
A Century of Musso & Frank

variety

“We’ve created a great and unique enterprise and I know that you will protect its legacy and do all to enhance its future in the years to come.”
HBO CEO Piepler Piped Out


Dem “Bones”

Bohemian Rhapsody VFX Freelancers Reportedly Owed Tens Of Thousands After Bankruptcy

“He loves America. Bautista’s fortress-like house — gray, split-block, with actual flaming torches on the outer walls — is in the blue-collar neighborhood of Port Tampa, close enough to MacDill Air Force Base to hear the trumpets playing reveille each morning and The Star-Spangled Banner at night. One of his latest tattoos is an American flag blowing across his trapezius… ‘I was never a party guy. I was all about the candidate,’ but it felt ‘like I had to pick a side. It’s like war, and I’ve come out very Democrat, but I do have some very conservative views, too.'”
The Epic Dave Bautista-At-Home-In-Tampa Profile You Didn’t Know You Needed

hollywoodreporter.com

“Oscars matter to talent. Netflix is showing talent that you aren’t lost if you debut on Netflix. You win an Oscar. They’ll use that street cred to attract more talent, so success begets success.”
Netflix Aligns Next Oscar Push

“Rotten Tomatoes is fighting back against online trolls, announcing that it will prevent users from commenting on a film before its release date, after a recent barrage of negative online comments targeting the forthcoming Captain Marvel.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Oscar Winner And Inventor of Gaffer Tape Ross Howell Was 92

“National Geographic should assume a leadership position in documentary films. It is as much of a big brand play for us as it is a business opportunity. These big doc films enable you to work with incredible talent, and support filmmaking at the highest level and support theaters. But in the end, our core business is a television business. Ideally, I’d love to make two to four of these doc films a year. We’ve got some great stuff in development.”

“There were so many great moments throughout the night, and it felt like they were able to shine brighter without a host, who often makes the audience feels like he’s pulling a train—and that train is huge, and the whole thing is exhausting, and all the while we’re supposed to find his frazzled nature endearing, but it’s really just tiring. I use the pronoun “he” here on purpose because, let’s be honest, the hosting thing is like the breaking-news thing—it’s a gig we don’t offer enough to the ladies, even though they are better at it.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“As Costume Designers we struggle with people in our own industry UNDERSTANDING our job, on this one night where the work is supposed to be elevated (look at the international ratings) this is perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation not only of taste (which is subjective) but of value to the film making process. We are not just ‘shoppers,’ as our job is so often misunderstood. We constantly have to explain our job this kind of mockery only underscores frustration. Feels like major steps backwards. SHAME on the Academy for allowing this to be broadcast.”

“Is that the central theme in your work – the fun of Eden, the joy before the fall? Can we talk through your films to see if that’s true?”
Mark Cousins on Stanley Donen

 

“If you want to see worthy winners, go to a racetrack… For bonus points, add a stream-of-consciousness yammer or an invocation to your chosen deity… The stage was an agora of diversity from first to last, and I would wager that more Spanish was uttered than on any previous Oscars night… The usual tossed salad, I would say, comprising the dumb, the deserving, the downright bewildering, and the meh… Billy Porter should be at least halfway through the complex business of strategically withdrawing from his frock. “
Anthony Lane Does Not Suffer Oscar

Magnum Photographer Chien-Chi Chang On The Set of Roma

“In many ways, being my own cinematographer was a shortcut, because there were images springing directly out of my memory,” says Cuarón. “I’ve always been involved with the framing and composition for all of my films. It’s something that I design by the inch and discuss with Chivo. Sometimes when I was framing during the production of Roma, these memory smells would come to me and then I would know that I was going in the right direction!”

“Britain’s host of ‘The Apprentice’ has called for himself to be given his own special award in recognition of the reality show’s success, after revealing that his wife is upset that he has never been allowed to keep a Bafta statuette. Lord Sugar said it was ‘unbelievable’ that the show had won two Bafta TV awards but that the physical awards had been taken by behind-the-scenes staff who made the show, leaving him with nothing to display at home.”
Lord Sugar Salty

 

Los Angeles Samuel French Bookstore Closing

Seattle Weekly  Ceases Print

https://twitter.com/thegregorye/status/1100124090910760961?s=21

LA Times

“The movie was clearly a palatable brand of godawful…  I find [it[ both dishonest and dispiritingly retrograde, a shopworn ideal of racial reconciliation propped up by a story that unfolds almost entirely from a white protagonist’s incurious perspective… There is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult.”
Justin Chang Bangs Book

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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