The News Selected by Ray Pride

“Denzel Washington is said to be getting his $20 million plus backend fee, while the sheer number of bonuses tied to the HBO Max day-and-date plan is said to be costly for the studio.”

Hollywood Reporter | January 15, 2021

Peter Levinsohn: “The theatrical window is the cornerstone of our business because it establishes the brand. We at Universal believe very strongly in the theatrical experience. But it's also no secret that we have felt as a company for some time that forcing consumers to wait three months following a theatrical release of a film, regardless of how well that film does, doesn't make any sense in a world where consumer behavior is shifting so dramatically because of all the other content alternatives. We've got this wonderful marketing organization that creates events around every film as part of its theatrical release. If we force the consumer to wait three months to see it in the home, we ultimately have to gear that marketing up all over again from scratch.”

Hollywood Reporter | January 15, 2021

Maureen Ryan: “So how long until Josh Hawley is on ‘Dancing With the Stars’? I wish I didn’t have to ask that question. But if past is prologue, in coming years we should expect executives in television, news, film, publishing, and other influential media industries to line up to help far too many reprehensible ghouls launder their reputations. Hawley and Ted Cruz, along with 145 other Republicans in Congress, challenged the results of the presidential election last week—hours after rioters desecrated the U.S. Capitol in a rampage that killed five people. Many politicians like them—not to mention a whole constellation of Trump cronies, racist insurrectionists, and craven agitators inside and outside the government—spent the past few months stirring up that terrifying mob. Media executives in a position to reward those folks with some convenient rebranding opportunities should not do so. They really, really shouldn’t.”

Vanity Fair | January 14, 2021

"Laura Poitras says she’s been fired by First Look Media over Reality Winner controversy. Now she’s questioning the company’s integrity."

Poitras: "I will share a few things I’m proud of: co-founding The Intercept, First Look Media, and Field of Vision; supporting filmmakers with uncompromising artistic and political vision who reach wide audiences and recognition (including 5 Academy Award nominations); fighting for non-extractive contracts in which filmmakers maintain copyright of their creative work; working alongside many extraordinary journalists and filmmakers; and speaking out when a pattern of impunity and retaliation puts sources at risk. Because of The Intercept’s negligence – including their failure to consult with their own security experts – Reality Winner was arrested before the story was even published, denying her the crucial window of time for the focus to be on the information she risked her personal freedom to reveal to the public. Reality Winner is still imprisoned as I write this... The tragedy here is that First Look Media and The Intercept had all the financial resources and digital security expertise to do this right, and yet they failed to apply their basic founding principles of source protection and accountability to themselves. Instead of conducting an honest, independent and transparent assessment with meaningful consequences, First Look Media fired me for speaking out, exposing the gulf between the organization’s purported values and its practice."

January 14, 2021

Vikram Murthi: “High Fidelity’s endurance as both a piece of IP and a flashpoint for media discourse is mildly baffling for obvious reasons. For one thing, its cultural milieu is actually dated. Even correcting for vinyl’s recent financial resurgence, the idea of snooty record store clerks passing judgment on customer preferences has more or less gone the way of the dodo. With the Internet came the democratization of access, ensuring that the cultivation of personal taste is no longer laborious or expensive, or could even be considered particularly impressive (if it ever could have been). Secondly, as one might imagine, some of Hornby’s insights into heterosexual relationships and the differences between men and women, even presented through the flawed, self-deprecating interiority of High Fidelity’s main character, are indeed reductive. Frears’ film actually strips away the vast majority of Hornby’s weaker commentary, but the novel does include such cringeworthy bits like, “What’s the deal with foreplay?” that are best left alone. Accounting for all of that, though, it’s remarkable how many misreadings of Hornby’s text have been accepted as conventional wisdom. It’s taken as a given by many that the novel and film earnestly preach the notion that what you like is more important than what you are like when, in fact, the narrative arc is constructed around reaching the opposite conclusion.”

January 14, 2021

David Fincher: "I was never interested in Herman Mankiewicz’s conflict with Welles or anything about credit arbitration. I don’t know why it has to be said, but apparently it’s getting lost in all this: Citizen Kane is a fucking towering achievement. Forget that Welles was twenty-five. It’s a towering achievement. He continued to have peaks and valleys, but he was masterful. He was a showman in ways that most of us in the DGA can only hope to scratch at. I always considered Welles’ legacy to be granite. With titanium inserts. I don’t think it’s possible to chip away at that. What was interesting about Herman Mankiewicz was not that he was in conflict with anyone. It’s that he was in conflict with everyone. Including himself. He doesn’t kiss babies. He doesn’t save puppies from burning buildings. He’s difficult. He’s contradictory. He was a mad, careening wit who, if there was a great rejoinder, just couldn’t help himself. It was like, shave-and-a-haircut, two bits. He was like Roger Rabbit. He had to fucking do it. He had to say it for the same reason everyone around him wrote down everything he said. Because it’s pleasurable. It’s a kind of truth to power that is pleasurable for the little guy. Look how exquisitely placed those explosive devices are. “The white wine came up with the fish.” “How to get people into theaters? Show movies in the streets.” “Perfect equilibrium: I won’t work at half the studios and the other half won’t hire me.” And yet, he never did so much damage that people didn’t adore him. Somehow the force of his true human failings and confusion and all that stuff seemed to temper the vitriol. I thought maybe we could make a movie about him like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. About somebody whose job it is to be in the wings."

January 14, 2021

"Joan Micklin Silver's devotion to background becomes lyrical in Crossing Delancey, where the senses are overwhelmed by the casual intensity of New York shared by Upper West and Lower East Side Jews in love: Yiddish storefront signs hawking wine “you can almost cut with a knife,” subway entrances and the racquetball courts adorning the corner, the Chinese bodegas across the street, the just-right book titles on display in bookstores and apartment shelves, indoor jogging tracks at the Y, pickle delivery men, Jamaican taxi drivers in training, and a homeless street singer who wanders into an 86th Street hot-dog-and-papaya-juice-stand and—on a brief, enchanted evening—becomes the center of the universe."

January 14, 2021