Press Releases Archive for February, 2019

Wolfgang Puck Marks Twenty-Fifth Year Feeding Oscars Governors Ball

91ST OSCARS® GOVERNORS BALL CREATIVE TEAM ANNOUNCED LOS ANGELES, CA – Academy governor Lois Burwell, event producer Cheryl Cecchetto and master chef Wolfgang Puck will team to create this year’s Governors Bal, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official post-Oscars celebration, which will immediately follow the 91st Oscars ceremony on Sunday, February 24….

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Paul Feig’s Powderkeg launches Break the Room, company based on a development process to empower underrepresented voices

[PR] Paul Feig’s production company, Powderkeg has launched an innovative development company called Break the Room (BTR) with writer/producer Sameer Gardezi.  BTR is a writers room development process originally piloted by Gardezi in partnership with MuslimArc, and with support from the Pop Culture Collaborative, that approaches the creation of diverse content by bringing writers of color together with…

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True/False Slates 2019

Columbia, Missouri — The True/False Film Fest is proud to announce its 2019 slate of 36 new feature films and 18 new short films. These films were selected from roughly 1,100 submissions and hundreds more scouted from festivals around the world. Unfolding from Feb. 28-March 3, 2019, in Columbia, Missouri, the festival highlights works demonstrating…

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Press Releases

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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