MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2019

There “must be a limit to their generosity; we need to keep our expenses within the means of our readers.” 
Hardly Any Staff Left at Cleveland Plain Dealer

Cascade Drive-In Closes After 30 Years in West Chicago

Protean Artist And Pioneer Lesbian Filmmaker Barbara Hammer Was 79

Barbara Hammer’s New Yorker “Exit Interview” With Masha Gessen

Hed For Friday Night
“JORDAN PEELE IS NOT THE NEXT SPIELBERG OR HITCHCOCK. HE’S THE FIRST JORDAN PEELE”

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Suicide Squad Co-Producer, Who Is Blocking Congressional Request For Trump Tax Returns, Denies New York Times Reporting On Conflicts With Film Producer Profits In Dealings With China

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads
The rain taking all its roads
Nowhere.
W. S. Merwin, Former U. S. Poet Laureate, Was 91

“What I’ve learnt is that the more specific your writing, the more universal the appeal. If I try to make it Everytown USA, it falls apart. I’m very specific to where I’m at. But the fun part of that is, when I’m doing TV, I’ve always changed it. Most people think that you should want your adaptations to be slavishly devoted to the text; I’m the opposite of that.”
Harlan Coben

hollywoodreporter.com

James Gunn Will Return In Guardians 3

“Improvising legend. Filmmaking maverick. Comedy savant. Screenwriting secret weapon. Elaine May is one of the most important people in American pop cultural history. Why isn’t she more celebrated? That’s exactly how she wants it.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Forrest Gump Going Bollywood 

“In a twist, Hollywood writers are feuding with an unlikely subject: Their own agents”

Justice Won’t Release Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman Booking Photos

variety

Google Shuts Down Spotlight Stories VR Film Studio

LA Times

“I was kept in the dark,” recalled the writer, who was also an executive producer. “I thought my agent was helping me. I didn’t know there was this secret business.”
Tales of The Packaging Biz

Longtime People Editor-in-Chief Jess Cagle Out

NY Times

“It certainly creates a significant appearance issue. Not just because he previously was in the entertainment business, and may in fact go back into it at some point when he leaves Treasury, but because his spouse appears to have holdings in these films and is part of the film industry and may benefit if favorable terms are negotiated with China.”
Mnuchin Treasury Dealings With China Film Industry Thought Suspect, Even Unethical

NY Times

“Imagine being so insecure, you cry about a movie with a girl as the hero.”
Reacting To “Downvoting” Via Rotten Tomatoes And Other Corporate Arbiters Of Buzz

“Ostensibly, Dau, the much-anticipated multimedia project by Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, is a film, or a series of films. But it also claims to be something more: as the publicity material puts it, “a pluridisciplinary epic project,” existing “at the intersection of film, science, performance, spirituality, social and artistic experimentation, literature, and architecture.” Maybe the standard criteria of cinema don’t apply; standard moviemaking methods certainly don’t.”

Seeking Meaning Behind AT&T Dismissal Of HBO’s Richard Plepler

variety

Variety Casts Doubts On Annapurna And Megan Ellison

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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