I’m honestly not all that intrigued about becoming a Quibi subscriber. Not now, at least. But tomorrow’s another day.
Quibi honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg to Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy: “”A commitment to watch a Quibi show or an episode is six to eight minutes. And a series is two hours. To watch a Netflix series — I’m in the middle of Ozark right now — that’s ten hours. And theirs is about watching on a TV set and ours is about watching on a phone.”
McCuddy: “So you have no regret about launching in the middle of a pandemic with people unable to watch your content on TV?”
Katzenberg: “I have 100% regret about it. The good news about being a startup and being entrepreneurial is that when your customer talks to you, if not shouts at you, you must listen. And so literally we will launch, in less than two weeks, an update for the app that will let people watch Quibi on their TV set. That’s something we didn’t anticipate. And obviously we didn’t realize the world would be sheltered in place, literally. If that’s what the customer wants it’s our job to give it to them.”
“A novel angle on achieving notoriety in the art world is revealed in The Painter and the Thief, an engrossing Norwegian documentary born of the unlikely but resilient bond between a young female artist (Barbora Kysilkova) and a career criminal (Karl-Bertil Nordland) who stole two of her large canvases. Benjamin Ree’s second feature doc, after Carlsen, a widely seen 2015 portrait of Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, thrives on its odd couple pairing of two societal misfits in turmoil brought together by real circumstances — a situation that most fiction writers would reject as too contrived. Substantially in English, the film has an unusual and positive nature that will help find it homes in docu-friendly markets.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 1.123.20 THR review.
Ghomestead maintained that “Warner Bros. promotion guys, realizing that savvy showmen in the south were doing well with [Bonnie and Clyde] as a Thunder Road-like tale of high spirited lawbreaking, smartly capitalized on that [and thereby gradually] made it a hit”.
Gaydos reposted his 2003 Variety piece (“Truth takes bullet with Clyde tale”) which basically said that the legend about Kael’s review is not supported by research and that the film gradually became a hit through old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears — i.e., the promotional kind.
HE reply: I see. Thanks, guys, for straightening me out. So to sum up (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong), Pauline Kael’s landmark reassessment in The New Yorker had little if anything to do with saving Bonnie and Clyde. Instead it was the Warner promo guys re-selling it as a “Thunder Road-like tale of high-spirited lawbreaking” to redneck audiences.
A film inspired by the French New Wave, a film that was clearly ahead of its time, a film that Francois Truffaut was initially interested in but passed on, a film with an art-filmy impressionistic sequence when Bonnie and Clyde visit her frail old mom, and another when they’re found wounded and bloodied by Okies,,..this alternately edgy and poignant film was reborn when WB sales guys pitched it to Nehi Cream Soda-drinking yokels. So Pauline Kael was incidental at best. Got it. Check.
I’ll accept the Gaydos assessment — “Bonnie and Clyde [was] carefully nurtured from Montreal to Manhattan with both studio and private promotion, solid reviews and solid business and given time to build into a breakout hit just as dozens of other films of the era had” — blended with the impact of the Kael piece, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
Without tossing out the redneck promotion side-story, the likeliest scenario is that Beatty saved the film (and his own financial ass) by refusing to back off in his dispute with the antagonistic Jack L. Warner, to the point of threatening legal action.
Wiki excerpt: ” At first, Warner Bros. did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film’s lack of commercial appeal.
“Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde‘s producer and star, complained to Warner Bros. that if the company was willing to go to so much trouble for Reflections in a Golden Eye (they had changed the coloration scheme at considerable expense), their neglect of his film, which was getting excellent press, suggested a conflict of interest; he threatened to sue the company.
“Warner Bros. gave Beatty’s film a general release. Much to the surprise of Warner Bros.’ management, the film eventually became a major box office success.”
HE hereby apologizes to Spike Jonze for having posted the badly-scored version of his landmark 2005 Gap commercial, “Pardon Our Dust,” instead of the correct one. The correct version [directly below but shitty looking] uses Edvard Grieg‘s “In The Hall of The Mountain King,” which lends an arch, mock-bombastic air to the raucous destruction of the Gap store. The incorrectly scored version, posted yesterday, uses a sickening Up With People recording of “Don’t Stand Still.” Between the two videos is a 2005 paragraph (written, I think, by an Ad Age reviewer) about the differences.
During a chat with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn about Spike Jonze‘s Beastie Boys Story doc (AppleTV+), Beastie Boy Mike “Mike D” Diamond notes that during the watching of Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, “Every three minutes something happens where you’re like, ‘That could never be in a movie in 2020.'”
Kohn: “It often seems like Stiller doesn’t get enough credit as a filmmaker.”
MD: “He really doesn’t. Cable Guy is incredible.”
Spike Jonze: “Escape From Dannemora is incredible.”
Jonah Hill: “I’ve heard ‘Stiller doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker’ enough to think that there’s something behind it. He’s made so many bangers. I think there’s something interesting in that statement in itself. He’s made like five of my favorite movies. Then I heard this from film people, that he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker, but maybe it’s a backhanded compliment, because who says he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker? Do you think it’s because, if he just had that roster of five films we all love — if his IMDb was just, RealityBites, TropicThunder, Zoolander, CableGuy and Escape From Dannemora, you’d be like, ‘This guy is one of the best guys around.’ You think it’s because he’s also so famous as an actor that it strips back some of his props as a filmmaker?”
Kohn: “Jonah, this all feels very meta since, like Stiller, you’re a comedy guy now making your way into directing movies.”
JH: “I couldn’t know yet because I haven’t made enough films. But of course, I’m interested in that question. It’s so fascinating. There’s a selfish interest in that, but I’m also thinking about it as a fan of him as a director.”
MD: “Here’s an interesting footnote: Adam and I first met Ben Stiller after Paul’s Boutique came out, and after Cable Guy came out. We had this shared misery of putting all this time into a project that we respectively completely believed in. We didn’t even question it. To make stuff for this company and they’re like, ‘This thing is great’. And then it completely tanks commercially. But then some people say they love it. It’s a weird conflict.”
Taken in 1959 from somewhere near B’way and 48th. Otto Preminger‘s Porgy and Bess opened on 6.24.59. Notice that John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers, playing at the Astor, is billboarded in the distance. Ford’s film opened on 6.12.59.
This Is Cinerama opened on 9.30.52. It played for at least a year at the Warner. After one year in four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago), pic had grossed $4,305,000, with $2,208,000 in New York alone.
William Wyler’s Detective Story, promoted on two-side Mayfair billboard, opened on 11.6.51. The fact that Audrey Hepburn (whose biggest 1951 credit was a small part in The Lavender Hill Mob) isn’t wearing a cold-weather coat suggests pic was shot right after Wyler’s film opened.
The Berners would rather see Trump win than allow Biden to run unblemished. To hear it from them (along with the #BelieveAllWomen crowd), Tara Reade‘s inconsistent, highly questionable sexual assault accusation is straight from the King James Bible. Despite the fact that it’s full of holes and almost certainly bullshit. Please consider this 4.29 USA Today piece by former federal prosecutor Thomas J. Stern. Read it, give it some thought, take two steps back.
Posted on Facebook by Sasha Stone:
1. As you all already know I’ve been sounding the alarm against the hysteria of the #MeToo movement for a while now. I think it was a necessary over-correction to a long history of women being disregarded and not listened to. But I also think it was more of an irrational reaction to Trump’s election. We couldn’t do anything about Trump so we went after people we could destroy. Currently on the scrap heap are a lot of people, some who deserved it (Harvey Weinstein) AND some who didn’t (Chris Matthews, et. al.). It went way too far, and now has become weaponized. At this point, I think it’s gone so far that we’re about to see a pendulum shift way back in the other direction, where every accusation is shot down.
2. We have to admit on the left that we didn’t want Kavanaugh on the court. Period. We would have done anything to stop him. I myself believed and still believe that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth that she was not-quite-raped. I can’t say, and no one can say, that Kavanaugh was the guy. Also, I was never comfortable with a 30-year-old charge being enough to completely wreck someone’s reputation. But I’ll come clean and say I was caught up in it because I didn’t want him on the court. So I went along with it.
3. The Tara Reade case has made me reflect a lot on that case and now I feel like we did not follow the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty. And I went along with character assassination. Now I feel like there has to be a healthy balance of women who feel like they CAN report sex crimes and be listened to and believed rather than making Dustin Hoffman a sex offender 40 years later for patting women on the rear end on the set.
Virusbros can whine all they want, but there’s nothing wrong with hiking up the all-but-deserted Stone Canyon Drive at sundown if you keep your distance and mask handy.
Campos: “I first commented on the story [last] Monday because Lynda LaCasse told Business Insider that Reade had told her the far more extreme assault story in 1995 or 1996, when they were neighbors. What I didn’t know at the time was that LaCasse had spoken with Reade in 2019, when Reade publicized the first story,” etc.
Campos conclusion: “Now of course none of this is conclusive by any means. It’s possible that Reade is in fact telling the truth about what happened, or perhaps that she’s telling the truth about what she thinks happened, although it actually didn’t happen. But it seems far more probable, weighing all the available evidence, that she’s lying about the purported sexual assault.”
From “Trump erupts at campaign team as his poll numbers slide,” by AP’s Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire: “President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.
“’I am not fucking losing to Joe Biden!,” Trump repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.”
15 years ago a bizarre but historic Spike Jonze commercial appeared. Called “Pardon Our Dust,” it was ostensibly about a forthcoming renovation of Gap stores. But many of us (myself included) immediately recognized that the actual focus was rage against the corporate dominance of American retail culture. Wild but thought-provoking, it depicted a sudden burst of rebellion by Gap employees and customers alike.
I remember having a sharp argument with David Poland about this. Poland, who always knows everything, pooh-poohed my interpretation. “You don’t get it,” I replied. “It’s about people breaking loose and venting their frustration by way of exhilaration and mad anarchy…it’s the finale of ‘The Day of the Locust‘.”
Like many other critics and journos, I live each day in mortal fear of the New Stalinists. Which is why I asked some pallies what they thought about my posting a fairly inconsequential piece about James Toback‘s Love and Money (’82), which I watched the night before last.
Message: “I wrote a mild little piece about Love and Money, but I’m not sure I have the backbone to post it, mainly because agents of the wokester Khmer Rouge may conclude that I’m a Toback apologist, which I’m certainly not as far as reports of his personal behavior are concerned. The piece is hardly incendiary, but do you agree that ‘they’ might come after me if I posted it?”
Here it is: The career of director-writer James Toback was terminated roughly two and one third years ago. Stories about Toback having allegedly sexually harassed over 300 women saw to that. This behavioral pattern went on for decades, to go by an L.A. Times article (1.7.18) by Glenn Whipp.
It follows that no Toback-directed films (including the brilliant Fingers and the provocative Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White) are allowed to be even mentioned, much less discussed; ditto Toback’s screenplays for Karel Reisz‘s The Gambler and Barry Levinson and Warren Beatty‘s Oscar-nominated Bugsy, which were once highly regarded.
I’m nonetheless scratching my head about Love and Money, an oddly disjointed film that’s viewable on Amazon. Directed and written by Toback and a complete financial bust when it opened in early ’82, it was generally regarded as a sloppy, spazzy thing.
But you have to wonder what Love and Money was in script form for Warren Beatty and Pauline Kael, no slouches in their respective fields, to have invested their attention during the late ’70s development process. It must have amounted to something unusual or interesting — there had to have been something there.
Wiki summary: “Beatty was interested in producing and starring at one point in the late ’70s, for Paramount. Beatty persuaded Kael to work on the project. Kael was an admirer of Toback’s and Beatty’s and had recently left film criticism to work in Hollywood. However, Kael dropped out of the project after a number of weeks, instead becoming a consultant for Paramount. (She would eventually return to film criticism.)
“Beatty dropped out of the film to concentrate on Reds. Toback and Paramount could not agree on casting without Beatty’s involvement. The project was put into turnaround. Toback set up the film at Lorimar. Filming started in November 1979. It finally opened on 2.12.82. It made a grand total of $14K.”
From Vincent Canby’s N.Y. Times review: “Love & Money is a very strange film. Although it is packed with plot, it seems sort of skimpy, so skimpy that one suspects that somebody — either Mr. Toback or someone not so fond of Mr. Toback’s overheated mannerisms — had ruthlessly chopped the print that’s now going into release.
“I wasn’t much fond of Fingers, Mr. Toback’s first film as a writer-director, but that film at least had its own roaring, cockeyed intensity, whether you liked it or not. Love and Money, as it stands here, looks as if the director had filmed a treatment rather than a screenplay. Instead of being intense, it just seems to have periodic fits.
“Love & Money [is punctuated with banalities] intercut with wildly unpredictable moments that too often are unintentionally funny because there are no buildups and nothing to connect them. The film eventually does get to Costa Salva, a [fictional] Central America country which looks a lot like a Los Angeles suburb, where the plot becomes even dimmer and where the production money seems to have run out. When we attend a rally addressed by Costa Salva’s dictator (Armand Assante), it looks like Arbor Day in Peoria.”
