MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2019

variety

New Rules Introduced To Streamline Best International Film Category

“If you’re going to make something, make something that doesn’t point to anything.  I’m attracted to people who are self-starters. Ferrara is a big self-starter. He gets no help, he makes his stuff out of nothing, so you really feel contact with making something. There’s no buffer. You feel that every inch of the way, and that’s a nice feeling. When you’re really in the process, you don’t worry about anything. You don’t worry about money, about the reception–any of that stuff. I don’t, as an actor. I’m happy, I got my plate full, I’m chewing away, and I feel alive.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Star Wars directors must feel like the Hollywood equivalent of all those unfortunate Imperial admirals in the original trilogy. One misplaced Rebel fleet and it’s instant death by studio chokehold.”

“One underlying problem Benioff and Weiss’ exit illustrates is that there is still no consensus as to what Star Wars is and what Star Wars should be.”


Maryland’s Bay Weekly To Close After Twenty-Six Years

“It’s still a movie that has lost millions of dollars. We found our audience late, and we found them on a platform that paid pennies on the dollar for the movie. Years after The Guest came out, I noticed a pattern. I’d have meetings with executives at big movie studios and streaming platforms, and when I’d ask what kind of movies they were looking for, they’d say “we’d love to make a movie like The Guest.” Now, I just thank people for liking the movie. I hope its popularity continues to grow. Maybe it will become a movie that people watch every year at Halloween. I’ll do what I can to encourage that, and each year we can chip away at the unrecouped budget until hopefully this creative success story can also turn into a financial success story.”

Landmark Theatres Names Paul Serwitz Prez, CEO

LA Times

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Finds its Director at the Met

Dan Kois Profiles John Sayles As Matewan Goes Criterion

Bilge Ebiri On The Insider at 20

View Six “Bespoke” Home Screening Rooms from Monaco, Los Angeles, Notting Hill and Britain’s First Home IMAX Joint

The DVD Wrapup: Lion King, Sisters of Wilderness, My Son, Martin Guerre, Jirga, Horror Guide Part II, Harmonia, Bunuel’s Susana … More

Kanye West Says $68 Million Tax Refund Is God’s Reward for Being a Christian Under Trump

nymag

“Ultimately, Condé Nast’s fate is up to the Newhouse family. A new generation has taken over since the death of Si, who loved the magazines, the most glamorous delivery devices for cultural power and advertising revenue for much of the 20th century. The question that lingers is how much the Newhouses value these storied brands and are willing to invest in their continual reinvention. “The family can financially withstand years of losses, but they’re also facing the challenge of Why should they?,” a former executive close to them said. “The family doesn’t view themselves through the lens of Condé Nast, and I don’t think they would suddenly wake up tomorrow and say, Who am I? if Condé Nast wasn’t in their lives.”

“You know, the other night I read the piece that you wrote 10 years ago,” David Letterman told me on a rainy day earlier this month.

“It took you long enough,” I said.

“And I thought, Holy shit, this is so disturbing and, sadly, a perspective that I did not have because the only perspective I had was in here.” Dave gestured to himself. “I’m sorry I was that way and I was happy to have read the piece because it wasn’t angering. I felt horrible because who wants to be the guy that makes people unhappy to work where they’re working? I don’t want to be that guy. I’m not that guy now. I was that guy then.”

“Journalists and writers are prone to gauzy mythologizing, and a great publication — Gawker, The Awl, Splinter, The Village Voice, Pacific Standard, Topic, Mad, Racked, VICE media properties, not to mention all the glossy magazines that have abandoned print, publications that laid off their editorial staff as part of some desperate pivot, and the local papers that have shuttered completely — never seems more righteous or essential than in the immediate wake of its death. Sentimental hyperbole easily goes viral, and feels truest when everyone is still drunk on the memories, and indignant about what’s being lost. So I’m going to attempt avoiding gauzy mythologizing and sentimental hyperbole when I say that the sports blog Deadspin, which is not yet dead but hearing its own death rattle under its newest owners’ moronic leadership, has been the world’s best daily website at least since I started reading it about a decade ago. No other publication has turned such a consistently critical, interrogative, moral, and necessarily cynical eye toward an industry rotted through with bullshit, while also maintaining the levity and humor sometimes required to think seriously about what many people see as children’s games…”

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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