MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2019

The Chimes Of Calvin College On “The Faith Of Paul Schrader”

“I know how many motherfuckers hate me. ’I’m never going to see a Sam Jackson movie again.’ Fuck I care? I already cashed that check. Fuck you.” 

hollywoodreporter.com

“I’m crazy about them both. That a parent’s zeal for her children’s future may have overcome her better judgment for a moment is not only unfortunate, it is, I know we parents would agree, a universal phenomenon. If ever there were a use for the Texas Verdict, this is it. For the uninitiated, the Texas Verdict is: “Not Guilty, but Don’t do it Again.”
David Mamet On The Accusations Against Longtime Friends William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman

VICE Still Oozing $200 Million Annually?

“Harmony Korine has always been a compulsive maker of things: zines, paintings, drawings, films, photographs, poems, myths, books, screenplays. When he was younger, Korine said, “I had so many ideas and images, I didn’t know how to control them. All day, it was just coming to me.” Back then he couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night. Now, at 46, Korine has a little more control over his own creativity, he said. But his studio is still dense with the products of his overflowing mind: Cohiba cigar boxes painted in bright colors, scrawled with Korine’s child-like writing. “People always make fake cigars. I wanted to make my own fakes,” he said. He showed me a bound manuscript that he said was a book of poems that he wrote entirely on his iPhone, using the Tom Hanks typewriter app. The manuscript’s title was ‘Destiny’s Aborted Child.'”

How Odeon Cinemas and the Chain’s Founder, Oscar Deutsch, Opened More Than 250 Cinemas Across the UK in Thirteen Years

“Cindy Holland on how Netflix uses data to help set budgets, make cancellation decisions”

Sonny Bunch Says Box Office Figures Are A Culture-War Battleground

Pain’s World: Penelope Spheeris To Hollywood: “They Can Blow Me”

Words with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Particularly For Elaine May And Against The Coens

Behind the Scenes At This Year’s Arthouse Convergence

In A New Yorker Profile, “Bill Hader Kills”

LA Times

STX Pickup: $700 Million In Additional Capital

“I’m not talking about my own experience with Amazon, who backed Peterloo and who behaved impeccably: the problem really exists for younger filmmakers. The new streaming services all like to say they don’t work like Hollywood. But, actually, by suggesting a director works with a particular team, or asking why you are not using a female cinematographer, or wondering whether the film should have an upbeat ending, they are behaving in a traditional Hollywood, Louis B Mayer-way and it is totally unacceptable.”
Mike Leigh

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Stan Lee, Via Dave Itzkoff

“Andy had simple dreams. He wanted to kiss that girl again—the one he met, the one who ghosted. He wanted to go back to the Ngong Hills in southern Kenya, where there is a tree on a hillside bending in the wind. He missed it so bad, he said. Andy wanted to recover from Parkinson’s. He wanted not to be lonely. He wanted to have a family, to feel little babies crawling on him.”
James Longley On Andrew Behrends

NY Times

“Sheinberg dealt with all people like a battering ram: Do it his way or get out of the way.”
Remembering Spielberg Mentor Sidney Sheinberg

LA Times

“Well, it’s simple. When it all comes together, Marvel will have access to almost all of its characters, and that’s something that most companies that have intellectual property characters have always had. Marvel, in a unique way over the years, has not had access to all of its characters, and now it will. That just seems like something that’s very appropriate and exciting for me — at the potential and the possibilities to come.”
“What Disney’s acquisition of Fox could mean for Marvel’s superheroes”

“I would love it if these powerful Hollywood kingmakers took all their clout, Academy cred, mentorship capability and ridiculous bags of money – and channeled that energy into the most crucial issue facing their industry today: inclusion. Please, don’t squander your outrage by planting your flag on this issue of theatrical releases.”
Thelma Adams Has Questions For Steven Spielberg’s Oscar Umbrage

Jim Hemphill Revisits Luke Perry’s “Great, Unheralded Performance” in John McNaughton’s Normal Life

variety

“I deeply regret that I have made mistakes in my personal life that have caused pain and embarrassment to the people I love the most. I also deeply regret that these personal actions have caused embarrassment to the company and to all of you… Since WarnerMedia’s leadership became aware of details surrounding this situation some time ago, it has carefully reviewed the matter and handled appropriately. [T]he company will again work with a third-party law firm to review the situation, and I will cooperate fully with this investigation. Please don’t let my mistakes become a distraction. It’s important that we all stay focused on our work—and part of that is creating a culture and company of which we can all be proud.”

“If you ever find yourself in a room or situation where Brett Ratner seems like the sane, grounded one, run as fast as you can. Your life has somehow taken a very wrong turn.”
Lessons From The Tsujihara Reveal

hollywoodreporter.com

“His not very nice! Very pushy!! He just wants to —- nothing else does not even want To say anything!”
Packer responded, “U OK?” and told her to “Be cool.”

variety

Jan-Michael Vincent Was 73

IFP Announces Jeffrey Sharp New Executive Director To Lead the Organization

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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