SAG Awards Rescheduled Again, To April 4, To Avoid Rescheduled Grammies
Jeff Zucker Announces End To CNN Airport Network
Failed Federal Response To Pandemic Leads To More Postponed Pictures: “Hollywood players will continue to take different approaches to operating and finding the best way to reach audiences during the pandemic. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal appear more primed to ride out the next few months, with contingency plans that range from day-and-date releases on streaming services to accelerated premium video-on-demand windows. Neither Sony nor Paramount have a streaming service ready to offload titles, so those companies will probably continue to delay release dates or sell their movies to platforms like Netflix, Hulu and and Amazon.”
“Different buyers hold different places in the media food chain. Alden is the deepest and most aggressive cost-cutter in the American news industry. The company hollowed out some of America’s once-greatest local news organizations including The Mercury News and The Denver Post, both of which are now news organizations on life support. An Alden purchase of all of Tribune doesn’t have to be a fait accompli. In fact, the threat of such a deal represents an opportunity for civic-minded local investors across the country, who could use this case to not only save a critical local news institution, but to reinvent it… If Alden already owns nearly a third of Tribune, could life under new full ownership possibly get worse? The answer is yes. Alden began acquiring distressed news properties as a debt holder. The strategy is unabashedly to run newspapers for cash, treating them as bonds or financial oil wells, until they run dry. At the moment Alden lacks either board or direct management control. The acquisition of the rest of Tribune would give Alden free reign to maximize near-term cash returns by pursuing its cost-reduction playbook.”
“A second round of funding from the Culture Recovery Fund is now open to independent cinemas in England whose businesses have been unavoidably interrupted by the pandemic.”
Thomas Vinterberg on Another Round: “This was meant to be a life-affirming film. That’s what was important to me — that the love from these people came through to the audience in a life-affirming way. Because my life went into a catastrophe at that time. My daughter died four days into shooting this film. It was about her school. It takes place in her classroom. She was in the movie. Everything was destroyed in my life when it happened. A couple months before shooting this movie, she had read the script, while she was in Africa. And she was very, very honest with me. She’d been tough on my scripts if she didn’t like them. When she read this script, she sent me a letter declaring unlimited love, to the project and to me as an artist. When she died, I was surrounded by psychiatrists and shrinks and they said to me, “If you can eat and if you can shower, and if you can look people in the eye without crying then maybe you should probably get back to work.” And I said, “I can’t.” Because I cried all the time, and I still do. Then I talked to Mads Mikkelsen, and I talked to the editor, and we said, “How can we make a film about four drunk people when this happened?” But we couldn’t turn it down because we knew that Ida, my daughter, would hate that we quit the movie because of her. Then it became so important for us that this film became life-affirming, that it became about more than just drinking. We ended up making it to honor her memory. I don’t think I’ll regret that.”
Paul W. S. Anderson: “The movies I gravitated toward tended to be movies that were very visual and sparse on dialogue: Walter Hill’s The Driver, which is a beautiful movie with very, very little dialogue, and also the works of Jean-Pierre Melville, who heavily influenced Walter Hill. Melville was taking American archetypes, gangsters, and then putting them in Europe and making these very cool existential European gangster movies with very little dialogue and lots of looks and glances. Even in life, you read all these studies where it says 80 percent of communication is visual rather than verbal. So even if you’re standing in front of somebody, you know whether they’re angry or sad; you can tell what they’re trying to say to you just through the visual cues that they’re giving you. So it’s more of a challenge, but it’s perfectly possible to build character through action. And action is always dictated by space and by location, so that tied the whole thing together for me. In terms of this movie, specifically, I was influenced by a John Boorman movie called Hell in the Pacific, with Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin. At its heart, it’s a story of two characters who just hate one another, but they’re trapped in this isolated place. They try and kill one another at the start, but if they are to escape from that island, they have to learn how to work together. Obviously, we’re a totally different movie from Hell in the Pacific, but the relationship between Milla and Tony builds in a similar way. I like these quiet moments where people don’t speak, and I like working with actors where you can just stare at them and imagine what they’re thinking, project yourself into their head. Because once you start doing that, then you start empathizing with that person, and you’re doing it visually rather than through telling backstory.”
Dorian Lynskey: “None of these gambits were working until the cavalry arrived in the form of actual consequences, starting with the cancellation of MAGA Senator Josh Hawley’s book contract and the removal of Donald Trump from social media. Now this was something the pundits could get their teeth into. Free speech! Cancel culture! Slippery slope! Here was their chance to crawl back to their comfort zone of aggrieved self-pity, where they could issue mealy-mouthed pleas for national unity and healing while expandering the parameters of unacceptable wokeness to include anyone who thinks that politicians who incite sedition should not simply carry on as before. I guess Trump boycotters such as Deutsche Bank, Forbes magazine and the Professional Golfers’ Association are woke now. I do not believe that every form of censorship by a private company is fine just because it’s legal, and I think that Big Tech’s disciplinary procedures require more consistency and transparency, but let’s be clear: there is no Twitter purge of conservatives.”
Richard Rushfield: “Without being overtly political, how much more good has Marvel done by producing Black Panther and Captain Marvel than by a million table-pounding lectures? How many people who would’ve tuned out a lecture five milliseconds in enjoyed these movies, were touched, and in some small way changed by them?”
Gothams Locate Nomadland
Aaron Sorkin Anoints Aaron Sorkin As Man To Tell The Story Of Lucille Ball And Desi Arnaz For Amazon Studios In The Snack-Size Form Of A Single Week Of Production; No Word The Couple’s Business Acumen And Attainment Will Be Part of The Backlot Walk-And-Talks
Chicago Tribune, After Exits of Architecture And Music Critics and Cubs Authority, Relocates Remaining Staff to Printing Plant Out By The River
Dr. Anthony Fauci: “If everything goes right, this is will occur some time in the fall of 2021, so that by the time we get to the early to mid-fall, you can have people feeling safe performing onstage as well as people in the audience.”
Talking to Lexi Alexander About Wonder Woman 1984: “There was a time when certain production companies made movies that specifically dehumanized Arabs in order to justify invasions in the Arab world. If you don’t make them human, then who cares? But I don’t think that’s what happened with Wonder Woman. I think they probably thought they’d be getting great press: “Look how nice and friendly she is to Arabs.. They think this is how they get rid of racism, by centering themselves. If Gal Gadot wanted to say, “What do I put in the script so that this doesn’t come up?” I would say, “You’re not the one who needs to tell this story.” But there’s nobody in Hollywood who says that.”
Peter Maass: “The Murdochs attract far less attention than their hired hands, the journalists and shouting heads who have downplayed COVID-19 and created the delusional content that helped catapult Donald Trump to the White House. The New York Times, in the approximately dozen stories it has published that touched on the Biden laptop controversy, referenced the Murdochs in just two of them, in passing. At the Washington Post, only three articles about the laptop mention the Murdochs — again, in passing. There’s no shortage of reporting about the wretched content created by the Murdoch machine, but remarkably little reporting about the fact that the Murdochs are behind it. As MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes noted on Twitter after the first laptop story came out, “If you’re just choosing from people in OECD countries, ostensible liberal democracies, Rupert Murdoch has to be up there as the most-single-handedly destructive person of the last three decades, right?” But Hayes can be part of the problem. While he often criticizes Fox, and on rare occasions discusses the Murdochs, most of the time he fails to mention the family that could literally flip a switch and shut off the poison. On April 20, Hayes broadcast an eight-minute segment about Fox encouraging protests against stay-at-home orders, and a week later he devoted seven minutes to detailing the ways in which Fox downplayed COVID-19 — but while he named hosts and guests who spread the worst disinformation, “Murdoch” never passed his lips.”
Cameraman Mike Dibb: “John Berger is the one writer who stayed with me right through my life, I loved the way he wrote. The way he used language was very simple. His sentences were never long. I began to cut out his articles… It’s quite rare to later meet someone who’s been that influential. But I met John in the 60s, in London for lunch, because he did a wonderful translation of Brecht’s poems for the theatre…. ‘Ways of Seeing’ was a four half-hour film on topics of his choice. And, because we knew each other, I was asked to be a researcher, with the possibility of directing one of the films. So we were able to develop that series on our own with no one hanging over us. It was a journey of discovery for both of us. Although I filmed conversations with John sometimes, I never used them. There was something about the way he distilled his thought as he wrote that was always much better than his conversation. Not that he wasn’t wonderful to talk to, but it was always full of silences.”
Jack Ma, the Jeff Bezos of China With $500 Billion Alibaba, Still Disappeared
Schwarzenegger On How It Can Happen Here video
National Society of Film Critics Seeks Out Nomadland
Maria Bakalova: “It may be crazy, but I looked at that cage as a metaphor for the patriarchal society. I think about all the moments in my life that I was underestimated because I was a female. We live in 2020, and sadly some misogynistic attitudes from the past still exist. One of the things that really appealed to me about the movie was its message, that we have to treat everyone equally regardless of their nationality, race, gender and sexuality.”
