Jason Kilar: “There is no situation where everyone is going to stand up and applaud.”

“My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism… If you disagree with Mr. Epstein, fair enough. Write a letter or shout your objections on Twitter. But these pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.”
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Stands Beside Its Assignment Of Attack On Jill Biden’s Academic Credentials To Elderly Man With Extensive History of Spiteful Remarks

Cleveland baseball team drops its name

Good Dr. Bordwell: “The trend I have in mind is different. It’s the de luxe book dedicated to a director, with documents capturing the creative process and texts written by serious critics. Call it the Massive Auteur Monograph.
Massive because it’s high, wide, and handsome, as well as heavy. Some of these books are monstrously big, and all boast coated paper and production design suitable for a book on any of the fine arts.
Auteur because it pursues the idea, now commonplace, that the director is the central creative figure in much filmmaking.
Monograph because it’s not just an anthology but rather a through-composed argument about the significance of the auteur in question. Even when the book compiles texts by several hands, those texts form part of a coherent “database” sprawling across the big pages. In art publishing, books like this are a staple, often attached to particular exhibitions or museum collections. And we’ll see that there are some forerunners of these cinematic “art monographs.” But now I think we’re seeing the MAM come into its own.”

John le Carré Was 89

George Clooney: “Amal uses this evaluation of where we are in the world. The people who are exposing crime and corruption are being put in jail. And the people committing the crimes are free. So – yeah! – it’s an interesting time. And I think it’s certainly worth picking fights with people like this, because I would be embarrassed if I wasn’t standing against someone like Viktor Orbán. I just feel like, with kids this age, having young children in a period of time when there’s all this craziness, I wanna make sure I can say, ‘These are the things we did to stand against this moment in history.’ Not just to make them proud. But to make their world better.”

Richard Rushfield: “This isn’t just reaching into the vault, it’s strip-mining the IP mountains until nothing is left but a cloud of dust. Just 10 new Star Wars shows? Why not a thousand? When you’re reaching down for reboots of Turner and Hooch and Sister Act, better hope they work because you’re not leaving much on the table for a next act. They’re an inch away from having to do the unthinkable: make some original stories. Although you can always take an original pitch—”A fireman who’s scared of heights teams up with an orphaned Doberman”—and say “What if that happened 300 years before the fall of the Empire?” Presto: You’ve got IP.”

“This image, of a newspaper publisher literally in shackles, really speaks volumes about where Hong Kong is at right now.”

Producer Michael Shamberg: “It’s easy for Apple TV+ to pay a lot to buy Greyhound which, according to industry insiders still made Apple an additional $100 million-$125 million based on calculating the first piece of content a new subscriber watches after they sign up. Legacy studios like selling to streamers because they lock in a profit without risking tens of millions in advertising plus the film’s budget. Paramount made more money this year offloading Coming to America 2 and The Trial of the Chicago 7 to Amazon and Netflix, respectively, than they did in theaters. MGM is rumored to be trying to sell its crown jewel, the next James Bond film, to Apple, Netflix or Amazon. Where does this leave cinema…”

Jason Woliner on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: “Here’s the craziest thing: Giuliani was the name from day one. Rudy was the name in the first version I read and what we didn’t anticipate was the timing of everything. Rudy became very prominent again just before our movie came out. For the year-and-a-half we were making this, he wasn’t at the level of prominence he is now. But suddenly just before this came out, he was trying to make a big splash and a few days later The Guardian came out with the piece on his scene in the movie and that just blew up. And from my vantage point, it discredited anything he was trying to do. In the room, we built a cubby for Sacha to be in and I was in a nearby room watching and texting with him and figuring out when he should come out and save her. We had a million ideas of how it could go and when he laid down on the bed my jaw hit the floor.”

Deborah Eisenberg on Let Them All Talk: “Well, so much of my life has been surreal anyhow — it was just one more surreal episode. I was very, very surprised, and we did meet up in Los Feliz — did I say that right? Steven outlined the few sentences that he and Greg had talked over, and, naturally, there was a lot of allure for me, as well as something like stark terror. But for one thing, if life offers you a chance to work with Steven and you say no, you might as well just curl up and die no matter how frightened you are. For another, I am actually well-situated to work on a project concerning women of around 70. And that was very, very important to me. In any event, I’m quite interested in what happens to people over a long period of time, how lives take shape, the stories people tell themselves about their lives, and the way they try to figure out their lives. I’ve seen a lifetime’s worth of movies about hugely pathetic old people. Particularly, women are portrayed as sort of clownish, adorable, theoretic creatures. And the idea of elderly beauty is just considered a joke, at least in most of the U.S. Either you’re looking at a horror movie or industrial-strength plastic surgery; it’s all tremendously sad and kind of amusing. But that was very, very interesting to me: to look at women my age in a way that didn’t wink or blush and would also assume that people didn’t stop having their lives at a certain point. Our lives actually just get more interesting and, in a way, more dramatic.”

Christopher Nolan: “Theatrical is really only one part of what we’re talking about. You’re talking about your home video window, your secondary, tertiary windows. These are m very important to the economics of the business and to the people who work in the business. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the grips, the electricians who depend on IA and IA residuals for pension and health care. I’m talking about SAG. I’m talking about actors. I’m talking about when I come on the set and I’ve got to shoot a scene with a waiter or a lawyer who has two or three lines. They need to be earning a living in that profession, working maybe sometimes a couple of days a year. And that’s why the residuals structure is in place. That’s why the unions have secured participations down the line. When a movie is sold to a television station 20 years after, a payment is made to the people who collaborate on that film. And these are important principles that when a company starts devaluing the individual assets by using them as leverage for a different business strategy without first figuring out how those new structures are going to have to work, it’s a sign of great danger for the ordinary people who work in this industry.”

Jenny Shi On Her Breakthrough Doc, Finding Yingying

Kim Ki-Duk Was 59

AMC Theatres: “A significant spike in cases, together with delays of major movie releases or the direct or simultaneous release of movie titles to the home video or streaming markets in lieu of exhibition, have led to closures, prevented the opening of theaters in major markets and have had, and are expected to continue to have in the future, a material adverse impact on theater attendance levels and our business. These challenges have been exacerbated by the announcement by Warner Bros. that its entire studio film slate for 2021 will move to simultaneous release, which may result in other studios adopting a similar strategy.”

Endeavor Executive Chairman Patrick Whitesell: “This is a blatant attempt to self-deal and use our clients work to build their HBO Max streaming service, which our clients have no financial interest in. The simultaneous release on HBO Max will cannibalize the domestic box office and torpedo the traditional waterfall of economics that make movies profitable in the near and longterm for the studio and for our clients. Studios by and large have been delaying releases, or with clients’ consent and inclusion in the process, selling the movies to streaming platforms. But what Warner Bros. has decided to do is push forward with a theatrical release in the darkest days.  At a time where our own government leaders are telling us to stay home and away from loved ones, Warner Bros. is doubling down on ensuring box office failure and even worse, putting moviegoers who want to see a movie in a theater at risk. Moreover, we don’t see this decision as a lifeline to the exhibitors or a way of supporting the existing business. Rather, we see this as a purely opportunistic attempt to re-write the rules of windowing to WarnerMedia’s favor, while the theater owners themselves have been brought to their knees. Given that every movie is unique in how it is financially put together for our artists, and given that inside each movie there are unique characteristics from artist to artist, we will not accept a ‘one size fits all’ approach.?

Richard Rushfield: “Beneath the surface of people trying to make movies and do well for each other, there’s the real Hollywood, which is a business of fleecing the arrivistes for every penny they’ve got while they still have stars in their eyes.”

Brian Newman: “Time was – just about two years ago – I could honestly look an investor in the face and say that while the film business was a tricky one, and a bad investment most of the time, there was a path forward to potentially recoup your investment. That’s not a pitch I’ll be making again anytime soon. Over the past year, it’s become apparent that one can’t produce “on spec” anymore – you have to work on commissioned work, where distribution and financing are locked-in early. That’s because you can’t count on a decent sale. Not only are major buyers (SVOD) not buying, that also trickles down to mid-tier buyers. It becomes difficult to see a path towards recoupment. Now we add that it’s impossible to get insurance for an indie film, and if you manage to get it made, there might not be any buyers, the dynamics around investment are going to change or disappear, and fast. This is a profound shift, and the implications are still being sorted out. While there will remain exceptions – most smart producers and talent will have to move to a model that relies a lot less on equity.”

“One of the measures being crammed into the omnibus is a proposal from Sen. Thom Tillis to turn unauthorized commercial streaming of copyrighted material like an album on YouTube, a video clip on Twitch, or a song in an Instagram post into a felony.”

“Zodiac 340 cypher cracked by code expert fifty-one years after it was sent to the SF Chronicle”