AMC Theatres Seeks $500 Million Lifeline With Private Offering

NYT Editorial Board: “The Postal Service cannot be allowed to crumble in the midst of a national emergency. Though organized as a self-sustaining quasi-governmental enterprise, run without taxpayer funding, it is not just another business. Even in an increasingly wired world, the agency’s mandate of “universal service” provides a lifeline to remote areas. As this pandemic rages, its 600,000-plus employees are working to ensure that Americans receive their prescriptions and protective equipment and other essential items, no matter where they live. This year, the Postal Service is also playing an expanded role in sustaining democracy. In the new world of social distancing, mail-in and absentee voting are crucial to ensuring that Americans do not have to risk their lives to cast their votes.”

“Why throw money at the USPS, the Trump official asks, when the administration had already proposed measures that would restore its financial health, such as eliminating the rights of the postal unions to collectively bargain for wages?”
Bloomberg Writes About Postal Service Without Questioning Its Onerous, Republican-Passed “Mandated Prepayment” Of Decades Of Future Pension Obligations

“The committee is consulting with top epidemiologists in the field, and we will collaborate with our sister guilds and unions and the employers as we put together a comprehensive guide to help us all return safely to work… As we all keep focused on today and tomorrow, we hope we can also find some comfort and solace in our yesterdays. Both in having the backing and foundation of a Guild that’s over 80 years strong – and also in knowing that our work done up to this point is keeping people entertained and engaged, and possibly even lifting some spirits the world over. That need isn’t going anywhere. And when the time is right, we will go back to work, return to set, and do what we love… tell stories.”
Soderbergh Heads DGA National Board Committee To Restart Hollywood

LA Times Parent Shutters Glendale News-Press After 115 Years, As Well As Burbank Leader And La Cañada Valley Sun

Tim Horsburgh: “Feels likes this is becoming an overblown cliché. I’ve been to four-five film festivals a year for the last five-six years without getting sick once (certainly tired/hoarse from late nights talking in loud environments, but not ill). Am I an anomaly?”

“Without ticket and concession revenue, there will likely be a lot of unpaid rent, and it’s anyone’s guess whether the landlords will terminate the leases and evict the tenants or whether they will just deal with it. Even if we put the virus behind us, lots of people are going to avoid retail and movie theaters till they are comfortable that they are inoculated against the next iteration of the virus.”

Michael Che Pays A Month’s Rent For The 160 Tenants Of Complex Where His Grandmother lived

Sharon Waxman Crows: “The vision of reinventing the venerable Hollywood trade as a business-to-consumer glossy publication attracting brand advertising with a strong digital presence didn’t work. It was never going to work. Although owner Todd Boehly tried valiantly, the economics just never made sense. The glossy weekly publication never reached more than 70,000 or so readers. It was launched at a time when print had already begun its steep decline. And with a well-paid newsroom and a well-padded business staff that numbered as high as 250, even a [vital] digital audience would never keep up with the costs. TheWrap has chronicled this dilemma at regular intervals since breaking the news in winter 2009 that a group of investors that included James Finkelstein and Guggenheim Partners’ Boehly were buying the Nielsen-owned entertainment publications for a bargain-basement price of $70 million. Even back then, nearly all of those publications were losing money and THR was in one of the worst situations of them all. This was the self-same year that TheWrap was founded. And when a few of the investors approached me to buy TheWrap and bring it into the group, I told them what I also wrote for the record: I didn’t get it.”

“The Hollywood Reporter’s parent company Valence Media has been courting Jess Cagle, the former editor in chief of People and Entertainment Weekly who currently serves as SiriusXM’s chief entertainment anchor, to replace Matt Belloni as THR’s top editor, TheWrap has learned. According to an individual with knowledge of the conversations, Valence co-CEOs Asif Satchu and Modi Wiczyk have been in contact with Cagle, hoping he will take over the Hollywood trade. But the job may not be easy to fill given all the bad press generated in the wake of Belloni’s abrupt ouster last week and massive staff cuts this week to THR and sister publications Billboard and Vibe.”

Scott Feinberg: “Some coverage of recent media layoffs has been disgraceful — posting and then pulling a story, naming laid-off people who weren’t in senior roles, bragging ‘Exclusive!’ — and some outlets doing this have quietly furloughed many of their own employees and are barely paying others.”

“Fifty-five percent of workers at the nation’s largest grocery stores and retail outlets do not get any paid sick time”

“Costco Is Thriving During The Coronavirus Pandemic. Its Workers Say They’ve Paid The Price.”

Paul Schrader: “Awaiting more and more creative solutions to the lack of theatrical. The timid await the resumption of normal. I think normal is off the table. The bold will define the new normal. Meaning an online theatrical system with festivals, premieres, high ticket red carpets, arthouse Zoom conversations, a diminution of new films, a resurgence of older cinema, a program where respected authors and filmmakers suggest a movie per week and explain why they are worth watching not only in film buff terms what in ‘what should we watch tonight?’ terms. Are you listening, Ted, and Peter and Scott? All at an Amazon price point.”

Adam Phillips: “We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Nothing makes us more critical – more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused – than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism, that we should be less impressed by it and start really loving ourselves. But the self-critical part of ourselves has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive. It is cruelly intimidating and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past and it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about morality, and about ourselves.”

“The arse is the centre of the male body; it’s where you first kick your opponent, and it’s what you most frequently fall on when knocked down. Women are another army. Watch above all their eyes. The powerful are always hefty and nervous.”
John Berger’s Notes On Charlie Chaplin As Chaplin Turns 131

“It’s one of those things you can’t really appreciate something until it’s taken away from you. This has certainly accelerated a dystopian future look at what the landscape could look like. But I just innately believe that humans are social creatures and, ultimately, they will want to gather again. Streaming is great, it’s convenient. But it’s just not the same.”

LOST: Cinematographer Allen Daviau, 77, Shot Amblin‘, E. T., Avalon, Bugsy

Brian Dennehy Was 81

Dana Delany: “I met Brian in a bar, acted in a movie with him but the stage is what he loved. In rehearsal, he said, ‘This is it, kid.’ He was a fellow nutmegger, mick and a Marine. They don’t make this kind anymore. Love to his family.”

“I’ve been really happy to be someone to tell stories of people who don’t feel like they could go any place else. We were guided by people who always cared about journalism, and unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.”
Jason Schreier Leaves Kotaku, Citing G/O Media, Following Resignation Of Gizmodo EIC

“I was walking around Liverpool and spotted a used-record store. I always go into them. So I’m in there looking at a bunch of stuff, and it’s almost an hour before I even start talking to anybody. And I’m hearing the two guys who run the store talking, and they’re already impressed with me big time, not because of who I am, but because I’m not another American asking them about a bunch of Beatles shit! And when I did ask them about something, it was a real cool thing. I’d read in Alex Cox’s Spaghetti Western book that the theme Ringo Starr did for Blindman [but wasn’t used] is the B-side of ‘Back Off Boogaloo’. So I go, “Hey, do you guys have the 45 of ‘Back Off Boogaloo’, with ‘Blindman’ as the B-side?” Well, that they didn’t mind! [Laughs] “Fuckin’ hell, yeah!” I mean, that is really knowing your shit! They dug that!”