Tag: film

Steven Spielberg inadvertently confessed why he hates athletes, attractive adults, and Western Civilization in Interviews with Steven Spielberg:

The height of my wimpery came when we had to run a mile for a grade in elementary school, Spielberg said. The whole class of fifty finished, except for two people left on the track—me and a mentally retarded boy. Of course he ran awkwardly, but I was just never able to run.

I was maybe 40 yards ahead of him, and I was only 100 yards away from the finish line. The whole class turned and began rooting for the young retarded boy—cheering him, saying, ‘C’mon, c’mon, beat Spielberg! Run, run! It was like he came to life for the first time, and he began to pour it on but still not fast enough to beat me. And I remember thinking, ‘OK, now how am I gonna fall and make it look like I really fell?’

And I remember actually stepping on my toe and going face hard into the red clay of the track and actually scraping my nose. Everybody cheered when I fell, and then they began to really scream for this guy: ‘C’mon, John, c’mon, run, run!’ I got up just as John came up behind me, and I began running as if to beat him but not really win, running to let him win. We were nose to nose, and suddenly laid back a step, then half step. Suddenly he was ahead, then he was a chest ahead, then a length, and then he crossed the finish line ahead of me.

Everybody grabbed this guy, and threw him on their shoulders and carried him into the locker room,  and into the showers, and I stood there on the track field and cried my eyes out for five minutes. I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my life.

And that’s why he’s subjected the world to thinly disguised pederasty and Holocaustianity sermons ever since. But at least the Secret King secretly won. The joke was on them. He wanted to come in last, you see….

Gamma, confirmed:

Is E.T. your imaginary revenge – turning the Nowhere Man into a hero?

Oh yeah, absolutely. When I began making E.T., I thought that maybe the thing to do was to go back and make life the way it should have been. How many kids, in their Walter Mitty imaginations, would love to save the frogs or kiss the prettiest girl in class? That’s every boy’s childhood fantasy.

Pedo, confirmed (allegedly):

Then I thought, what if I were ten years old again – where I’ve sort of been for thirty-four years anyway – and what if he needed me as much as I needed him. Wouldn’t that be a great love story?

No, Spielberg, THAT’S NOT WHAT A FUCKING LOVE STORY IS!

An interesting analysis of some of the changes coming to Hollywood and the entertainment industry:

In the 1980’s super agent Michael Ovitz positioned his talent agency CAA as one of the most important chess pieces on the board controlling actors, scripts, producers, how studios were bought and sold, music rights, all the way through to sports contracts. Agents held the power. But today the world of agenting is very different and a major power shift is underway.

First, most of the big agencies have sold out to major hedge funds where their first responsibility is to revenue and profits which means yearly growth at all costs. This need to feed the engine has forced agencies to dig their tentacles deeper and deeper into the entertainment community, eking out every possible penny. Spreading tentacles isn’t new. Just read ‘When Hollywood Had a King’ to see how Lew Wasserman came up against the U.S. government in 1962 as he tightened his powerful grip over all things entertainment. In Lew’s case the U.S. government stepped in forcing him to choose between being an agent or running what is now Comcast NBCUniversal — he chose Universal. Today, it’s not one single thing that is cutting off agencies’ far reaching tentacles but a storm on many fronts that is leaving most agencies with very little space to move. The result: massive damage that will likely take years to rebuild, leaving space for others to fill the void.

For one, the Writers Guild of America’s has been standing firm that agents not be able to produce/finance movies. This is essentially exactly what Lew came up against in 1962. This strange practice of your agency, who negotiates your deal, also being your employer has been going on behind closed doors for a long time. But in recent years the agenting world got more brazen about including it in their business model to look more attractive to their new Wall Street owners. This backfired with the Writer’s Guild, seizing the opportunity to win back a little more power into the hands of the writers and their membership, agreed to strike in April 2019. Top Hollywood writers fired their agents and in doing so a key piece of Hollywood power was taken from the agents: 360 packaging (the process whereby agents package their writer, director, producer, and acting clients together so that a studio buys a package and the agency can charge a premium packaging fee which some argue incentivized them to keeps clients’ fees lower so they can make room for their own fees).

If this were all the agencies faced, they could overcome this hurdle and still reign supreme. Historically, agents were masters of their craft in coming up with complex structures for their top clients’ ownership, profit participation, merchandise, box office bonuses, etc. Needless to say, studios were also masters in creative accounting, working to keep as much money in their accounts and away from the talents’ bank accounts as possible. But the game was there. A game of give and take, all pinned to public data around international sales and box office. Playing this game helped agents look powerful and valuable to their clients so they remain signed to a ten percenter.

But then came Netflix and the likes.

Global distribution, hidden streaming numbers, and clear data driven decisions vs booking talent based on industry ‘heat’. Now agents have many of their bargaining chips taken off the table and their creative dealmaking tools are a shadow of what they once were. How much extra value do agents now offer compared to lawyers and managers?

At the same time agencies have pushed hard into new entertainment revenue streams. The biggest: live events for their music artists — the last remaining cash cows for a music industry decimated by streaming technology in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. But with the global pandemic many of these agencies have gotten caught without a chair to sit on as the music stopped playing in global arenas and stay-at-home orders swept the globe. With COVID-19 nobody is going to concerts — and they won’t be for a good time yet. Similarly agencies were hit with cancelled sporting events where big margins were also made by the agents not only representing athletes but integrating brands and driving marketing strategies.

Through these multiple one-two punches, the biggest players in Hollywood are on wobbly knees and the bell isn’t going to save them anytime soon.

Needless to say, the less power that can be wielded by Jesus-hating, devil-worshipping agents, the better. Also, while we can’t say anything about it yet, things are proceeding well on the Rebel’s Run front. And by “well” I mean very well indeed.

Hollywood does seem to feature an inordinately large number of deaths, which would presumably be the result of the Hollywood values possessed by the people who run it.

Harvey Weinstein said Jennifer Aniston ‘should be killed’ after he learned that the National Enquirer was planning to run a story accusing him of groping her, court documents have revealed. 

A trove of emails and other communications between Weinstein and his team offer a disturbing look at his reaction to the avalanche of sexual misconduct allegations that sparked his downfall in the fall of 2017. 

The correspondence is detailed in documents unsealed by the Manhattan Supreme Court ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing on Wednesday, where he faces up to 29 years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault late last month.

In one email thread, a spokeswoman for the movie mogul forwarded a note from the Enquirer about a report that Weinstein had groped Aniston at a premiere event for their movie Derailed in 2005.

Weinstein responded to the note by writing: ‘Jen Aniston should be killed.’

Other emails feature the desperate pleas Weinstein sent to some two dozen influential people, including billionaires Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, asking for them to help ‘resurrect’ his crumbling career and reputation.

On the other hand, Jennifer Aniston was neither killed nor attacked so far as we know. But it’s informative to learn to whom Weinstein was appealing.

UPDATE: Weinstein should be in prison until he dies of old age… or is Epsteined.

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced in a Manhattan criminal courtroom Wednesday to 23 years for sexually assaulting a former production assistant and raping an aspiring actress — a landmark sentencing in the #MeToo era.

Now that Weinstein has been convicted, it appears the #MeToo movement has another major Hollywood figure in its sights. CDAN offers a possible explanation for why Spielberg suddenly and unexpectedly bailed on the latest Indiana Jones movie:

This permanent A+ list mostly movie director is bailing on a project because of news he is trying to keep under wraps. Apparently there are recordings of him interviewing young child actors and asking them wholly inappropriate questions. The recordings are from about two decades ago and are from either one or two movies filmed at around the same time. He was only the director on one of them but helped cast both. 

Yet God hath placed by the side of each a man’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over him—a Guardian who sleeps not nor is deceived…. So when you have shut the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is within, and your Guardian Spirit, and what light do they need to behold what you do?
—Epictetus

Now we’ll have to see what sort of wrist slap the judge attempts to give the evil creature instead of the 29-year maximum sentence possible. But these guilty verdicts should open the door to more Hollywood trials, so that’s a good thing.

Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of third degree rape and a criminal sexual act in his high profile New York trial.

The disgraced Hollywood producer was convicted by a jury of sexually assaulting former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013.

He was found not guilty of the two most serious counts of predatory sexual assault and also first degree rape in relation to Mann.

And one needn’t feel sorry for the quasi-hookers who are obviously more than willing to trade access to their bodies for roles to understand that it is necessary to shut down the Hollywood sin factory.

Hollywood finds itself on trial as well. The New York case exposed systemic harassment within parts of the industry — so much so that some people declined to be named in this piece, or even speak to me about the topic, for fear of retribution. Some who I reached out to implied that they had stories of ongoing harassment, but could not go any further than that and were unwilling to go on the record.

It is good when the wicked live in fear of judgment.

It’s like they’re trying to hand us the superhero market:

In recent years, there’s been a growing desire from fans for the character of Spider-Man to be diversified. Into the Spider-Verse was fantastic for that, as it featured Miles Morales, the first non-Caucasian Spidey, in the lead. We still have yet to have a Spider-Man who’s part of the LGBT community, however, but current incumbent of the role, Tom Holland, has lobbied for this to happen at some point.

And it seems Sony agrees and is looking to make it a reality. We Got This Covered has been informed by our sources – the same ones who told us a She-Hulk show was coming to Disney Plus back in April, and that Taskmaster would be the villain in Black Widow – that the studio is developing a live-action Spider-Verse movie. As you’d expect, the hook would be that it would unite Holland with his predecessors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. We’re also hearing that Sony is particularly keen on getting Garfield back, as they want to portray his version of the hero as bisexual and give him a boyfriend in the film.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, The Legend Chuck Dixon and I finished the first draft of the Rebel’s Run script this morning.

Spider-man, Spider-man, he’s as gay as a spider can….

Well, I don’t know about you, but I know I’m incredibly excited about the totally new and revolutionary idea of sex-swapping Willie Wonka. Then again, Willie Wonka as a woman would almost certainly be an improvement from the obvious pedophile he was in the last two films:

Willy Wonka could reportedly return to screens as a woman in a new prequel film.

Bosses at Warner Bros. are allegedly considering taking on a female actress to play the role of the iconic chocolatier, after two previous adaptations starred Johnny Depp and Gene Wilder.

It’s also been reported that after Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the character from the Dahl estate in 2016, they are in the process of putting together a production team for the film.

I’m most curious about what they will call her. Vaggie Vonka? Baba Yanka?

It’s not really possible to ruin Star Trek, in my opinion, but according to the Dark Herald, to the extent it is possible to ruin it, Bad Robot appears to have successfully done so with Picard:

The blitheringly incompetent Bad Robot productions is producing Picard, so it takes place in the Kelvin timeline, because everyone wanted more of that! Kurtzman is running it so you know it was born as a festering boil covered abomination. And he has admitted that Picard is NOT a canonical sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

You heard that right. The much ballyhooed Picard is more J. J. Abrams fanfic!

And it’s been written by Avrika Goldman who wrote A Beautiful Mind (Wait! Stop! Don’t get your hopes up) as well as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, plus the Lost in Space movie. When Goldman is only in it for a paycheck he is the living embodiment of phoning it in.

And phone it in he did!

Starting off a Star Trek series with a anti-Nationalist political rant was a bad enough start, but following that with an action scene let all of the Star Trek fans know upfront that this one is on the fast track to ST:D-ville.

I’m not even going to pretend to care since I am congenitally indifferent to all things Star Trek, but I post this here as a public service.

These people are, as we are told, sick. But it’s not the mental health of Hollywood, but rather the complete lack of moral health, that is at the root of the problem.

As a seeming epidemic of suicides pummel the entertainment world, leaders and companies are responding with innovative answers to help erase the stigma around mental illness and provide help: “I’ve seen the pain and devastation it causes.”

In January 2017, 51-year-old U.K.-based locations manager Michael Harm —whose credits included the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — took his own life in a London hotel room. Shortly before, Harm sent a note to a friend in the industry describing his work as “one of the loneliest jobs on a film,” one that came with “no HR,” and urged more care on film sets.

In the three years since, a tragic procession of suicides have shaken the film, television and music industries, including those of host and chef Anthony Bourdain, manager Jill Messick, comic Brody Stevens, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, The Prodigy frontman Keith Flint and DJ Avicii. This year opened with news that Ugly Betty creator Silvio Horta, 45, had taken his own life.

It will not surprise me to learn that less than half of these “suicides” actually involved the individual taking his own life. We’re already well past the point of statistical improbability.

The God-Emperor continues to crush his enemies:

Although actors and actresses garner endless media coverage — and spend a lot of time telling all of us how they feel about President Trump — Americans don’t trust them.

According to a new poll released Tuesday by Morning Consult, just 4{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of Americans trust Hollywood. That’s lower than the number that trust Wall Street (5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) and the U.S. government (7{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}).

The news media comes in at a dismal 8{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}.

The nationwide survey found that the most trusted brands in America are: the United States Postal Service; Amazon, Google, PayPal, The Weather Channel, Chick-fil-A, Hershey, UPS, Cheerios, and M&Ms. It is, however, a contest of mediocrity, as no brands were found to be particularly trustworthy, with these 10 brands garnering stamps of approval from just 34-42{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of Americans.

But even above those are “your primary doctor” (50{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) and the U.S. military (44{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}).

Americans also believe “extreme weather warnings (36{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) and “teachers” (35{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}).

But Americans do trust two top celebrities. Tom Hanks came in at 34{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} and Oprah Winfrey at 27{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}.

Shockingly (at least to the news media), Trump comes in at 20{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} on trustability.

I tend to suspect that trust for Hanks and Winfrey is going to disappear very, very rapidly once The Storm begins. There seen to be more Hollywood suicides every day.

Highlander actor Stan Kirsch dies aged 51 in apparent suicide at his Los Angeles home.

Every single time….