MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2019

hollywoodreporter.com

“It was a race for bragging rights. Miramax just edged out Phantom Menace by an hour or a couple hours.”
How Harvey Weinstein Beat George Lucas to Digital Distribution, Just Because

hollywoodreporter.com

“Avengers: Endgame returns to theaters worldwide with the promise of an 18 second introduction by director Anthony Russo, and a post-credit scene that includes “an unfinished deleted scene,” as well as a glimpse at Spider-Man: Far From Home. It’s a big to-do for what will amount to little. Fans are what the rerelease of Endgame is relying on, if you can call it a rerelease with the original cut still playing in theaters [which may be against MPAA rules]. The wide rerelease of this version is a thinly veiled attempt by Marvel to unseat the highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar. Endgame needs about $38 million to cross the threshold, and many are expecting it to clear that final hurdle, if not this weekend then over the next week.”

indie wire

“The takeaway from the New York Times piece is not that movies are dying, it’s that Hollywood is in trouble. If Hollywood is struggling, maybe it is time to reframe this tired discourse and remind us all that cinema is about a lot more than Oscar movies and summer tentpoles. I watch hundreds of new films from around the world every year, and I find it hard to be pessimistic about cinema as an art. Maybe a more relevant and less cynical question to ask is how an art form might sustain itself or even thrive while the business around it flounders.”

Sir Jony Ankling Apple; First Client: Apple

variety

“Salke and Berney may not have meshed, but a source close to Amazon said that the entertainment chief has confidence in her other deputies, a group that includes Ted Hope, Julie Rapaport, and Newman. The source also stressed that the company is in the film business for the long run. That may be, but replacing Berney could be a challenge. There’s a perception that Amazon is feeling burned about its movie business experience. In that environment, top marketing and distribution chiefs may not want to take the job unless they know that Amazon is committed to the film business.”

 Hidden LifeTerrence Malick Gets A Date 

Sundance’s John Cooper Stepping Down After 2020 Fest

Brit Ann Sarnoff New Warner CEO

“Thr expectations of the world-devouring $200 million was what was in the box-office writers’ heads. So when they saw it coming in 40% below that outrageous estimate, the fire alarms went off. But they can’t say that, because they aren’t supposed to be basing their reporting on the NRG numbers that no one dares speak aloud. So it’s a dud based on the guidance. “Well below studio predictions of $140 million to $150 million,” is how the LAT put it.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Village Elder Joel Silver Out At Silver Pictures

“There was the night a blizzard buried Manhattan and Dunleavy, “reclining” with a young woman in a snowdrift outside Elaine’s, and had his foot run over by a snowplow. Snarled Pete Hamill of the Daily News, ‘I hope it was his writing foot.'”

variety

“I recently came down with an acute case of movie-world-itis — call it ‘franchise fatigue’ fatigue. The symptoms are as follows. It’s blockbuster movie season (otherwise known as: any given week of the year), and a handful of sequels, reboots, and tentpole-smash wannabes have all come out and performed badly. The media predictions of weekend grosses were not met. The studio dreams of box-office triumph were not fulfilled.”
A 1990s Sunday Peter Bart Column by Any Other Byline

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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