“I was always trying to learn as much as I could about moviemaking. That’s why I did so many. I mean, why would anyone go from making a movie in the style of The Godfather, to go to a movie in the style of Apocalypse Now, to go to a movie in the style of One From the Heart? I was deliberately making decisions like that. But that’s not a good thing if you want to have a career. I wouldn’t change my life. There’s one movie I wouldn’t have made because it cost me everything, and that was one of the movies I made at a time when I had to make a movie every year to just keep my house and my household together. I fantasize having not made Gardens of Stone. I wouldn’t have lost my son.”

Barry Hertz: “Telefilm Canada news: Rather than choose who does and who doesn’t receive development program funding this year, the federal agency has decided to fund every filmmaker who applied and is eligible. No external jury process required.”

“i promise i’ll stop disney posting after this tweet:

the biggest thing that’s bugging me (besides Disney flaunting how much IP they’ve consolidated), is listening to people describe everything that’s coming as “content”

not anything that’s exciting, or artistic, just

content”

Werner Herzog: “I don’t have a smartphone. I do not want to absorb reality through applications on the internet or on my smartphone. This is why many things I do not want to delegate to a cellphone photo or to a memory stick. That’s why, for example, witnessing the birth of my child, I would never go in with a camera and keep it as a memory, as a little movie. You go there as a man and you see this amazing, violent act of a child being born. You just be there and you watch it in awe. You will never delegate it and you will never forget it. The bulk and sculpture of our memories are sculpted by ourselves, not by the facts. That’s the beauty of it.“

Kent Jones On The Red Shoes As The Greatest Restoration: “I used to believe that a great film can shine through all intrusions, limitations and corrosions. But that was before digital restoration tools. To see films like Ugetsu, Pather Panchali, Giant and Detour brought back to life has been a startling experience—as Geoffrey O’Brien once said, you realize that you haven’t really seen these films before. And as Martin Scorsese has pointed out, the poor registration and the lack of definition we used to live with affected the performances—you often couldn’t see the eyes of the actors clearly—hence the emotional impact, hence the clarity of the narrative, hence the film.I have rarely been as stunned as I was when I sat down in the theatre in Cannes and saw the UCLA restoration of The Red Shoes, three years in the making. I immediately forgot that I’d ever seen it before—it was like watching a brand new film, and it made almost everything else around it seem paltry and small. I knew how much work and loving attention had gone into that restoration, made possible by The Film Foundation, the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and HFPA. Bob Gitt and his team at UCLA worked in association with the BFI, ITV and Janus, and Thelma Schoonmaker was closely involved at absolutely every stage.”

“While the Cinemateca Brasileira was already in dire straits from underfunding and interference, Jair Bolsonaro’s election had escalated the danger—to the Cinemateca; to the Brazilian Film Agency (ANCINE, Agência Nacional do Cinema), the federal film-funding body, founded in 2001; and to Brazilian film in general—as Bolsonaro made clear when, on only his second day in office, he dismantled the Ministry of Culture. Bolsonaro’s government moved swiftly against Brazilian film in particular with increasing attacks and dismantlings, even in the midst of the pandemic. Bolsonaro was intent on erasing memory: nothing could exist before him. Any other country would claim as its own all the films and prizes that Brazilian cinema was then being awarded, but instead, its success evidently made him hate it all the more.”

Disney Plus Announces Fifty-Five-Plus Originals

Paramount Splits the Sheets With Jerry Bruckheimer

Boseman’s “portrayal of T’Challa the Black Panther is iconic and transcends any iteration of the character in any other medium from Marvel’s past. It’s for that reason we will not recast the character.”

“AT&T has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history. There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion… AT&T’s John Stankey said that the streaming horse left the barn. In truth, the horse left the barn for the slaughterhouse.” Villeneuve Blasts AT&T

Ben Fritz: “Imagining this when Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012: We’ll make five decent-to-terrible movies that leave fans with a sour taste in their mouths and then pivot to ten series for the Internet.”

CAA Richard Lovett: “Your determination to release our clients’ movies on HBO Max at the same time as in theaters effectively torpedoes the theatrical release and dramatically harms our clients’ ability to earn backend compensation, which they negotiated for, expected and have every right to protect.
You chose to release our clients’ movies on your own streaming service without any input from or discussion with our clients and you made no effort to negotiate with or otherwise seek out market-rate deals with other streaming services. This is the epitome of a self-interested corporate maneuver intended to benefit your company while wreaking havoc on the industry and ignoring and greatly damaging our clients’ creative and financial interests. To the extent you negotiated a license fee with HBO Max, which remains unclear, we reject that entirely as that is the job of their representation and is, in many cases, in violation of our clients’ approval rights... You unilaterally determined a value for our clients and their work to benefit the long-term prospects of HBO Max and the finances of AT&T, a choice that our clients did not make and a value decision that is out of sync with the marketplace and other streaming platforms. The bottom line is that you are trying to take advantage of our clients to benefit your company. Neither we nor our clients will stand for it. Worst of all, in a business of relationships, you violated trust and boundary.”

“Tillis Pushes Prison Time for Online Streamers After Pre-Election Hollywood Cash Blitz: Felony streaming legislation from Sen. Thom Tillis will be attached to an upcoming ‘must-pass’ omnibus government funding bill.”

George Miller: “‘I watch all of them. To be honest, in terms of this debate, cinema is cinema and it’s a very broad church. The test, ultimately, is what it means to the audience. There’s a great quote I saw that applies to all we do. It was from the Swahili storytellers. Each time they finished a story they would say, ‘The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault because I am the storyteller. And if it was good, it belongs to everybody.’ It’s a mistake and a kind of hubris if a film does well at the box office to dismiss it as clever marketing or something else. There’s more happening there, and it’s our obligation as storytellers to really try and understand it. To me, it’s all cinema. I don’t think you can ghettoize it and say, oh this is cinema or that is cinema. It applies to all the arts, to literature, the performing arts, painting and music, in all its form. It’s such a broad spectrum, a wide range and to say that anyone is more significant or more important than the other, is missing the point. It’s one big mosaic and each bit of work fits into it.”

Matt Stoller: “Facebook is a financial conglomerate. People think of Facebook as that website you use or the app that you use, but really Facebook, as a political institution, is a financial conglomerate and owns dozens of different companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook, the social network. And it’s a giant advertising company. They have roughly three billion users. And they try to get their users to do things that their advertisers want them to do, because that’s how you sell advertising. The business model is to divert revenue that used to go to newspapers and publishers to themselves. By manipulating people in this specific way that they do, which is to keep them using their system and keep surveilling them so that they can target them with ads, they are, in the process, crushing newspapers and publishers, which no longer have any financing, particularly local newspapers and niche publications like Black-owned newspapers. Increasingly, those kinds of publications don’t exist. You don’t have reporters covering statehouses and city halls and whatnot. Instead, people are now consuming things that Facebook likes them to consume because it keeps them using, and it keeps them available to sell ads to them, which are antisocial publications or posts, like anti-vax stuff or QAnon or whatever it is. It’s a $70-, $80-, $100-billion-a-year revenue company that’s destroying newspapers and publishers all over the world and getting people to pass conspiracy theories to each other so that Facebook can make money on advertising.”

Jason Kilar: “I feel very good about that because, if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve kept our ear to the ground in terms of fans and fan behavior. We’re cautiously optimistic. We’re going to be measuring this two ways, both box office and the subscription consumer behavior through Max. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. I can’t wave that away. But in terms of how we’re trying to approach this financially and economically with the folks that we partner with, we are endeavoring to be generous at every turn. The vast majority of those conversations have been very, very positive because as people are able to hear from us, and to be able to be taken through it, and to be able to have questions answered, ultimately people feel good about that. We all want a healthy industry, we all want storytellers to be compensated fairly and ideally generously, and we ultimately want studios to be healthy, too. So this is all of us doing the best we can.”

“A failure to engage with wider context is a failure to capture the real stakes of the conflict with Pornhub, and that’s the fundamental limitation behind the picture of abuse related by the New York Times op-ed columnist Nick Kristof in the latest entry in his long oeuvre concerning abuse, women, and sex. When Kristof turns his notebook in the direction of women with stories of trauma, the resulting narratives most often fall somewhere between beneficent voyeurism and journalistic malpractice. He has yet to face any professional consequences for his role in advancing the Somaly Mam Foundation, the anti–sex trafficking organization that, thanks to him, was able to launder allegedly invented sex slave stories through the paper of record. Kristof, meanwhile, became the mainstream writer most responsible for establishing the terms of the sex-trafficking debate for liberals and conservatives alike. Now he has pivoted from websites like Backpage, which sex workers once relied on for advertising and which was later shuttered by federal law enforcement, to websites like Pornhub. Poised to get the Kristof bump this time is a campaign run by a religious right organization, Exodus Cry, founded by a member of a Christian dominionist ministry, which has advanced anti-gay, anti-abortion, and antisemitic views.”

Anthony Tommasini: “I can’t imagine giving up my home collection. Yes, finding room in a Manhattan apartment to store ever-increasing numbers of CDs is a constant challenge. In my front hallway and living room I have five wall-affixed cabinets made for me by a carpenter friend, more than 90 feet of shelf space. In my home office I also have an industrial-looking file cabinet that efficiently holds nearly 2,000 CDs. I probably have, in total, more than 4,000 discs. (And I know people who have twice that many!) And, perhaps out of nostalgia, I still have a stereo cabinet with a long shelf for some old LPs, along with a good turntable in the living room. (Vinyl has been making a comeback over the last decade. And when I’ve popped into stores selling used and just-released LPs, the majority of customers seem to be young people looking for rock and pop albums. Go figure.)”

“The more than 3,800 members of the European Film Academy (EFA) have elected Polish director Agnieszka Holland as new EFA President, succeeding Wim Wenders, who has held the post since 1996”

“Streaming is not yet profitable for Disney — far from it. Losses in the direct-to-consumer division totaled $2.8 billion in the company’s 2020 fiscal year. Streaming-related losses are expected to peak in 2022, as rollout costs decline and content expenses normalize, with analysts expecting Disney Plus profitability by 2024.”