MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2019

“Very early on, I had Forrest playing football for Bear Bryant at Alabama. I thought if readers would believe that a perfect idiot could play football for Bear Bryant, they’d believe anything.”

daily beast

Eight Women Accuse Hollywood Filmmaker Max Landis of Emotional and Sexual Abuse: ‘We’re Not People to Him’

GishProtests Against Ohio University Removing Lillian Gish’s Name From Theater

“John Wick 3, Aladdin, and um, Endgame. How with a straight face do you make an argument that the world is tired of sequels when the biggest film of the year, #2 all-time grosser, is the twenty-second film of its series and the fourth film of its particular label/action group? It’s said a lot you have to “Give people a reason to go see a sequel.” Well, yes. In general, when you’re releasing a film, that tends to help. More than just saying, ‘Hey, uh, we’ve got this thing that some guy made and ummm, there’s a show at 6:30.’ ‘Give people a reason to go see’ is analyst-ese for ‘Make a good movie’ when people don’t want to get all subjective and call certain movies bad. Or at least, make a movie that looks like something different and exciting, that breaks through the clutter and gets them motivated to leave their homes.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Malick’s Hidden Life Acquired By China Distributor That Succeeded With Shoplifters, Capernaum and Cold War

Award-Winning Filmmakers Dan Cogan and Liz Garbus Launch Story Syndicate Production Company

Sundance Institute Brings Free Summer Film Screenings to Salt Lake City, Park City, Ogden, St. George and Coalville

“Jean-Pierre Melville built his own studio so that he wouldn’t have to take orders from anyone, and lived there with his wife and three cats. (The staircase from the studio to the flat upstairs features in nearly every Melville film.) He hated shooting because he had to wake up early and change out of his pyjamas. He could be charming but on set was often a tyrant; he considered it a betrayal when his actors became romantically involved. He was a great talker, with a deep, velvety voice, but he hated cliques and industry schmoozing. One of the fathers of the Nouvelle Vague, he soon fell out with his ‘children’. ‘I desire only one thing in life: to be left alone,’ he said.”

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Finishing touches.

A post shared by Todd Phillips (@toddphillips1) on

“Stacey Abrams made a special trip to Los Angeles to tamp down more talk of a Hollywood boycott. ‘The political realities are that a boycott won’t have the intended effect,’ Abrams said after meeting with industry leaders.”

“Beijing is now constricting Hollywood’s ability to peddle its product. ‘I don’t want to use the words “total freeze,” but it’s real.They’re not saying it officially, but the industry is operating as if it’s close to a total shutdown.”

 

Franco Zeffirelli was 96

variety

Veteran Exec Gerry Rich Takes Marketing Reins At MGM and Annapurna’s United Artists Pictures

LA Times

“The total number of master recordings lost in the fire could run as high as 500,000 recordings, the report said. Only a fraction of the original masters held in the facility were adequately copied, resulting in the loss of irreplaceable original masters by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Eagles, Elton John, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Muddy Waters, Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Bing Crosby and dozens, if not hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other recording artists.”

https://twitter.com/thegregorye/status/1139613109125959680?s=21

hollywoodreporter.com

“What’s challenging for Hollywood is that its economy is intimately linked with dozens of countries that aren’t full-on dictatorships but are hardly models of democracy. Which leaves it in a quandary: Should it break loose from countries that inhabit a gray zone, even if they’re on the dark end of the spectrum? Or should it hang in there, praying things won’t get too bad and maybe will even improve?”

NY Times

Bill Witliff, 79, Screenwriter of Legends of the Fall, “Lonesome Dove,” Barbarosa, Perfect Storm, Raggedy Man

“Comedy has all but vanished from the slate: not just the rom-com, but comedy in every form. Screwball, slapstick, gross-out, teen, parody, you name it: More than a genre, the entire estate of comedy, which has always accounted for a good half of Hollywood’s output and star-making machinery since the Paleolithic era, is gone. Last year, the six studios released a grand total of twelve comedies between them, which is even less than it sounds when you look at the details and clustered around certain corners of the industry in particular. Warners, with New Line remaining the only active studio comedy label, put out four. Uni and Paramount each had three. Sony and Fox, one apiece. Disney zero.”

variety

Amazon Prime Gets Amazon Studios’ Adam Driver-Starring $14 Million Sundance-Buy Torture Tale Two Weeks Into Theatrical

“It’s complicated and amazing to me, what Romero did. The way we think of zombies now—as slow-moving and undead—is because of him. In our film we echo, in very obvious ways, the commodity fetishism and the dead end of capitalism’s goal of endless consumption that he portrays so beautifully.”

variety

“The debtor filed a claim against Mr. Singer that he had no basis or legal right to file. Mr. Singer has denied even knowing this individual, let alone allegedly having interacted with him more than 15 years ago. The decision to resolve the matter with the bankruptcy trustee was purely a business one, as litigation costs would well exceed the amount requested by the trustee to pay off the creditors who were owed money when the debtor filed for bankruptcy.”
Bryan Singer To Pay $150,000 To Resolve One Rape Claim

“For the positive spin — and it’s not spin, really, because it’s really happening — the Facets staff has been in place a long time, and they’re really stepping up in a big way. We are all committed to making this transition a big leap forward. A succession search for a new executive director is underway. This, above all is most heartening.”
What’s Next For Chicago’s Forty-Four-Year-Old Facets Multimedia?

hollywoodreporter.com

Sylvia Miles Was 94

Speak, Fraternity: Tim Kinsella On Publishing The Shooting Diaries of Luc Dardenne

“After shooting was over, I went to Los Angeles for the finishing touches. The studio put me up in soulless corporate accommodation. I didn’t think I was going to be there for long, but I realised they were doing this psy-ops thing on me, trying to wear me down. People seemed to really enjoy the screenings, but then their ratings on certain aspects were always lower than executives thought they should be, which confirmed their fears that I had made an art film. They wanted me to put in modern music – or reshoot. But I didn’t take any of their dumb ideas.”

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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