1.
“YouTube Is About To Delete Independent Artists From Its Site“: Hugh McIntyre of Forbes details how the Google-owned site will block indie labels who don’t sign up to its new music service. See also: A report from The Guardian‘s Stuart Dredge and Dominic Rushe on how Google is making “a catastrophic error of judgment.”
“YouTube is preparing to radically change the site,
adding a subscription service that is intended to help them compete in the
streaming music industry. The Google-owned video site has already signed new
licensing deals with all of the major labels, but many independents are
refusing to take part. Apparently, not only are smaller, indie labels not being
offered the same deals as the majors, but the contracts that Google is putting
in front of them are less than fair. In order to show their muscle, Google has
stated that any label—meaning smaller, independent ones—that does not sign a
deal with them will not only be left off the new service, but will have their
content taken down from the original, free YouTube. Vice President and
Global Head of Business at YouTube Robert Kyncl recently claimed that they
already had deals with 90% of the industry, and that they had no choice but to
move forward.”
2.
“Beyond Jodorowsky’s Dune: 10 greatest movies never made“: BBC‘s Christian Blauvelt spotlights some unmade gems from giants like Eisenstein, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Lynch and Welles.
“Impressed immensely by Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ of 1977, Mel
Brooks and his producer Stuart Cornfeld approached the auteur to make a film
for them. Lynch’s first idea was to direct ‘Ronnie Rocket’ from an original
script he himself had written. The plot concerns a detective who travels to another
dimension and meets a three-foot-tall teenager who needs to be plugged in to an
electricity source at all times following a surgical mishap. Eventually the
teenager becomes a rock star named ‘Ronnie Rocket.’ Needless to say, this was
not a commercial project – even Lynch acknowledged as much. He agreed to direct
a script written by someone else instead, and so he heeded Brooks’ suggestion
to adapt ‘The Elephant Man’ as his next film. But ‘Ronnie Rocket’’s themes of
personal transformation and multiple interlinked worlds would pop up again in ‘Twin
Peaks,’ ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Mulholland Drive.’”
3.
“Francis Ford Coppola Writing An Epic About An Italian American Family, Says Future Of Film Is ‘Live Cinema’“: By Kevin Jagernauth of Indiewire.
“Back in 2012, Coppola shared details of a project he was
working on at the time, one that he said he was nearly ready to start
shooting. ‘My story is set in New York. I have a first draft. I’m really
ready for a casting phase,’ he said. ‘Movies are big in proportion to the
period. It starts in the middle of the ‘20s, and there are sections in the ‘30s
and the late ‘40s, and it goes until the late ‘60s.’ Clearly that didn’t quite
happen, and we’d wager that even someone of Coppola’s stature will find it hard
in today’s studio environment to sell them on a big, sweeping, costume drama.
(Someone please tell Coppola about HBO).
Anyway, we’ll see what, if anything, comes of it, but the director is still
pushing the future of cinema as a ‘live’ experience. You might remember that
when he was out doing the rounds for ‘Twixt,’
he had plans for a roadshow (which never really materialized after savage
reviews for the film) where he would ‘remix’ the movie on the fly from his iPad
(which he demonstrated at Comic-Con). And he thinks the future of film is headed
in a similar direction, where movies can be presented as they happen.”
4.
“TGI Fridays Got Rid Of Flair Because Of ‘Office Space‘”: Cinema Blend‘s Mack Rawden on how the Mike Judge comedy made the world a better place.
“‘Office
Space’ didn’t explode in
popularity when it was first released. In fact, analysts initially considered
it a bit of a failure because of its low box office. In the subsequent years,
however, the film started getting recommended and passed around like an
undiscovered gem until a really high percentage of the population had seen it.
Now, it’s firmly entrenched as one of the more quoted and watched movies of the
1990s, and apparently, it had a lasting effect on the restaurant industry, as
well. You know those pieces of flair Jennifer Aniston repeatedly bitched about
in ‘Office Space’? Well, they
were based off the real life buttons many servers actually had to wear at the
time at a number of chain restaurants including TGI Fridays. A few years after the film came out, however, the
chain discontinued the use of flair. Why? Apparently because people wouldn’t
stop making Office Space
references about it.”
5.
“‘Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?’: Meet the woman behind Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘Cosmos’“: Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir pens an enlightening interview with Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan.
“I thought that, you know, taking on the human origins of
global warming or even evolution via natural selection, that saying it so
frontally would result in a big pushback. But it hasn’t come to that. I guess I
expected, never having worked with Fox and National Geographic before, I was
expecting when I submitted my script that, you know, the vice president of
Standards & Practices or whoever would come back with some issues. And yet
it was just the opposite. It was, you know, letters in all caps saying, ‘I
cannot wait to see this show on television. Thank you!’ So, you know, life is
so rarely what I expect it to be. The things that I was steeling myself for
just didn’t happen. I mean, you know, the negative reaction to the scientific
ideas that are at the heart of the series was really different and very mild. I
have to be honest. I have read a smattering of those from sources where I could
sort of anticipate what the reaction would be. I did go there. And, you know,
it seemed like it was more in sorrow than in anger. [Laughter.] I didn’t see
anything personally that was disturbing.”
Image of the Day
“Kanye West meets one of his greatest influences, Alejandro Jodorowsky“: A rather priceless photo-op reported by Cedar Pasori of Complex.com.
Video of the Day
MEMORY CITY from Stephen Cone on Vimeo.
A brand new short film from the extraordinarily talented Stephen Cone, director of “The Wise Kids” and “Black Box,” developed through the Acting Studio Chicago CINEMA LAB. Cast includes Amy Jean Johnson, Bob Kruse and Maggie Suma. View all three of Cone’s latest Cinema Lab films here.
