MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2019

ny post

“The Senate’s position was very clear on Amazon, ‘We are against tax incentives to bring business to New York.’ That’s why Amazon is gone. I can see them being wholly consistent…saying and ‘that’s why we’re against the film tax credit’ because it’s the exact same point.”
Petulant, Posturing, Presidential Wannabe Governor Cuomo Could End $420 Million Support For Film Production In New York State

https://twitter.com/thegregorye/status/1108849397750624256?s=21

variety

“Day-to-day, our top priorities remain the same: to support the great content we’re creating and deliver a superb experience to our consumers, and to continue to build an inspiring, inclusive environment where employees can bring their best to work every day.”
A Lengthy Roster of Fox Executives Disney is Pink-Slipping

Fox 2000 Reportedly First Fox Division Snuffed By Disney

Terry Gilliam Talks Don Quixote With Bilge Ebiri

Netflix Doc Maven Lisa Nishimura Adds Indie Films to Portfolio

indie wire

“A dollar is a dollar wherever it comes from. But the bread and butter of our films is the theatrical release of new product. That’s going to stay as it is. It feeds the SVOD thing, this steady flow of new product/ We’re going to do what makes sense for us/ We know there’s some extra money in the cycle, but it’s nothing really profound. Listen, the whole world is heading toward a subscription model. It’s just the natural order of things.”
Eamonn Bowles Tells Anne Thompson About Plans For Magnolia Selects

“Meet Todd Looby, Executive Director Of BendFilm And Dad Extraordinaire”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Wall Street and other experts have lauded the strategic benefits for Disney, but also highlighted the cost of launching a streaming service later this year, which will be a drag on earnings.”

“I wish I could tell you that the hardest part is behind us; that closing the deal was the finish line, rather than just the next milestone. What lies ahead is the challenging work of uniting our businesses to create a dynamic, global entertainment company.”

variety

“Disney is scheduled to take possession of 21st Century Fox at 1202am ET. Assets include: Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox 2000 Pictures, Fox Family, and Fox Animation; Fox’s television creative units, Twentieth Century Fox Television, FX Productions, and Fox21; FX Networks; National Geographic Partners; Fox Networks Group International; Star India; and Fox’s interests in Hulu, Tata Sky, and Endemol Shine Group.”

A Veteran Designer On The Psychology of Movie Poster Design

variety

“The overseas market is not an option any more, it’s a necessity. While the number of releases and general production costs of Korean films constantly rises, the box office volume is at a standstill. Getting to a break-even point will become more difficult in future.”
Korean Film Distribs Downsize

hollywoodreporter.com

Analyst on today’s inception date of Fox Inc.; “That is a positive. As much I hate Fox News, they are lucky to be overly reliant on it.” 

NY Times

“Kevin has acknowledged that his mistakes are inconsistent with the company’s leadership expectations and could [affect] the company’s ability to [work] going forward.”
Tsujihara Out At AT&T-WarnerMedia-WarnerBros. After Consultation With Stankey

“Packaging is a lie. It is theft. It is fraud. In the hands of the right U.S. attorney, it might even be prima facie evidence of decades of racketeering. It’s that fucking ugly.”
David Simon

LA Times

“The initial meetings that we had with Larson were not dissimilar to our initial meetings with Ryan Coogler,” Kevin Feige said, laughing. “‘Oh, wait a minute. They’re interviewing us. We’re not interviewing them.’”

NY Times

“The store has more than 132,000 titles, many of them not available on the internet, or anywhere else. “We will fight to the death to keep this open.”
Scarecrow Video in Seattle Might Be the Last of Its Kind. Can It Survive?

variety

No Netflix Pix At Cannes Again?

“I wonder if I was too generous. But it’s hard to know. She very much feels she’s a victim. And that is a hard thing to reckon with. And that’s why I put in Phyllis at the end saying, “You are not a victim.” You know, the buck stops with you, Elizabeth Holmes.”
Alex Gibney

hollywoodreporter.com

“The state of the Hong Kong film industry is lousy! The local studios, they don’t want to invest in big-budget films. We used to shoot one single scene in a month; now a whole film is shot in 11 days! And we used to spend $250-300,000 shooting in one day; now no local film has that kind of budget. I’m not saying a big budget guarantees a good film, but we really don’t have that  scale anymore. What we need is a good, solid Hong Kong action film, the kind that made our mark in the world in the past. No one wants to invest in those films anymore.”
Sammo Hung

King Of Surf Guitar Dick Dale Was 81

NY Times

“Gaspar Noé’s Climax is the latest movie to push the ecstatic, frightening qualities of dance into horror.”

“And yes, it’s in Captain Marvel too: White superhero, POC sidekick. To be fair, “The characters would probably balk at the classification of ‘sidekick.’ Yet they’re designated by the films as such, by virtue of their stories ultimately working to support the main character’s arc. All of them exist to help the lead work through some issue or trauma and provide logistical backup.”

CBS Board Settles Another Sumner Redstone Lawsuit

Netflix Will Cut Québec Train Explosion Footage From Bird Box Within Several Weeks

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

“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