L. A. District Attorney Files To Extradite Convict Harvey Weinstein On Five Counts Of Rape, Assault

Ashley Judd’s Sexual Harassment Claim Against Harvey Weinstein Revived by Appeals Court

“Racquel Gates and Rebecca Prime have been named 2020 Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”

Report: Kodak Execs May Be Stock Profiteering

“X-Men was a truly pioneering film. You have to remember, this was before Spider-Man. It was the first major Marvel adaptation to reach mainstream audiences,” says Tom Rothman. “The seriousness with which it treated its themes of otherness, discrimination and alienation gave commercial action filmmaking a jolt of emotion and purpose.”

Oren Moverman: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these times, it’s that nobody knows anything, and everyone’s an expert. And I’m included. I see what’s happening now, the pandemic, as just the evolution moving faster than we thought it would. To me, it’s very clear that independent cinema, as we know it and as we love it, is over.Over, I think. But qualified: as we know it. The idea of independent financing, putting together films that have no home, taking them to festivals, trying to sell them — they’re going to have to take on a very different model, if they get made. A lot of producers I talk to are looking to set up projects with the streamers, the studios, whoever’s going to be left standing. Whereas the sort of grungy putting together of ten dollars here, ten dollars there to make a film — it’s possible from a financial standpoint, it’s just a question of where it will ever be seen.”

Yes. Without movie theaters in the foreseeable future, and with the way things were already going pre-Covid, we’re going to have to find a different model for showing independent films. For me, it’s very hard to see what that would be like unless Netflix or Amazon comes up with the idea of, say, having one lane for independent film. But I think that takes us into a conversation about cinema — if I can use that dirty word — and quality, and what kind of films won’t make it to the platforms.

Brad Bird: “When I think of all the things that would improve the experience of watching a movie, making it so ‘convenient’ that it’s indistinguishable from television doesn’t even make the top 20.”

Dublin’s Gate Theatre Closed At Least Until 2021

“Amid a pandemic that has shut down major cities and withered U.S. television and film production, Netflix plans have not hit a wall, thanks in part to its international focus. Broadcast networks stateside are acquiring Canadian and British shows to fill gaps this fall, but much of Netflix’s 2020 slate is in the can. While North America, Brazil and parts of India have production on pause, Netflix projects outside those regions —those in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Japan and South Korea — are up and running again after brief hiatuses. (South Korea never fully stopped production.) In Europe, 22 productions across 11 countries are back up.”

Toronto Fifty Takes Place Of 350 Entries; includes Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Werner Herzog, François Ozon, Halle Berry, Frederick Wiseman, Gianfranco Rosi, Regina King, Thomas Vinterberg, Viggo Mortensen, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Nicolás Pereda,  Kornél Mundruczó

Jean Renoir: “All technical refinements depress me. The perfection of photography, the big screens, the stereo sound, all of it makes possible a servile reproduction of nature; & that reproduction bores me. The artist’s personality interests me more than the copying of an object.”

Jim Cummings Offers His Short-To-Feature Lab Curriculum

Chaz Ebert: “Richard Roeper’s Chicago Sun-Times article about going to the movies during a pandemic made me feel nostalgically emotional. I read it with as much interest as I would read a science-fiction novel, as Roeper details the strange yet oddly comforting experience he had of attending a 70mm presentation of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theatre. The theater is open for limited-capacity, socially distanced screenings. It was Roeper’s first time going inside a movie theater for a film screening in four months, and even with patrons spaced far apart, he still found the sorely missed mode of escapism “‘safe and communal.'”

“While we don’t know the full details, we always analyze any new business decision within the industry. People need to be aware that the first big movie from Universal is not releasing for six months, so there is no pressure here; however, we clearly see this as a wrong move at the wrong time.”
Cineworld/Regal’s Mooky Greidinger Reacts to Universal-AMC News

“I got to know my crew — I’ve been working with most of these people for ten, fifteen years — a lot better because I’m on my bus living in the camp right next door to all of them. We’re all going in the evenings to the food trucks. We’re going to have drinks at the alcohol truck. So I got to know them a lot better, but also I’ve learned just their level of commitment to doing it. It was very moving to me.No, I’m on set 12 to 14 hours a day anyway. We did 22 episodes in a little less than two weeks, so it’s a lot of close contact. It’s a lot of working together all the time. This may sound a little arrogant, but the truth is we literally sat and went through every scenario that we could, so there was nothing that caught us by surprise.”
Tyler Perry On Pandemic Production

Ryan Stewart: “The Ringer podcast on the future of movies is a must-listen. “Which studio will be the first to go out of business?” Paramount has no streaming service, they’re just selling off their slate to Netflix. Tom Cruise is keeping them viable for now.”

“FASTs, the free ad-supported streaming TV services, increasingly look like they are going to be the “cable killers”–not Netflix.”

“Brigid Berlin came from the kind of blue blood money that Warhol only dreamed of, but swapped the aristocratic life of the Upper East Side for the creative slums of downtown Chelsea, becoming a muse to the pop artist, starring in several of his films, as well as being a constant companion, collaborator and documentarian. In her own right she carved out a career as an artist – though she refused the label – that incorporated performance, sculpture, Polaroid photography assiduously recording her raucous milieu, and a series of paintings made by dipping her breasts in paint and smearing them on paper to produce multi-hued orbs.”

“Madonna Rapped by Instagram After Hailing Demon Sperm COVID Truther Doc as Her Hero”

Sonia Darren, 96, Held Own Against Bogart In The Big Sleep

“Tomboy’s success is also down to a uniquely astute form of marketing, particularly on social media. South Korea’s biggest cinema attendees are young people, particularly women 20-35. Like a number of independent releases in South Korea, Tomboy’s distributor offered ingeniously designed special pins, decorative tape and photo cards that depict key scenes from the film, handed out at special screenings or awarded after seeing the film a certain number of times. One set of pins, for example, mirrors a scene in Tomboy with the young protagonist’s first kiss, with folds in the presenting card enabling the characters’ eyes to be covered.”