Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

^^ check out. 'Queen Greatest Hits II' (that blue one) was released in 1991 and I remember that cd begin *everywhere* at the time.

*checks

Good Omens injoke about every car containing a cassette of Queen’s Greatest Hits is troooooooo

added queer subtexts.

I mean, I can’t read more than three panels of Claremont before my eyes dry up, but I’m given to understand he baked the subtext into the source pretty richly

i agree Singer took the genre seriously and X2 is fine, but he's very uninspired. the subtext alone isn't much to write home about imo bc it's not done very interestingly. I won't draw a line in the sand there because i have no real issue w/anyone thinking he's solid, since that's all separate from the larger issues at play at present. I guess the main question is, why is Bryan Singer of all filmmakers too valuable as a talent to exile? He is a replacement level talent, at best. This is not a new thing, these allegations have gone back for twenty years and unlike other rumors the stories ring true.

he's not talented enough for me to protest a blacklist, so throw'em in the thorns

Singer kinda takes me back to the days of late-'90s AOL movie message boards when people would list their "best filmmakers of all time" and the lists would be like Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, Darabont, Singer, Kevin Smith.

have not seen any Singer films except Usual Suspects, which was a decent stunt-noir I suppose. I think you can tell he loves 16-year-olds from his subsequent filmography.

why is Bryan Singer of all filmmakers too valuable as a talent to exile?

or, is bryan singer even the low bar? how far down could you go? is the guy who directed deuce bigalow too big to throw under the bus?

Hollywood is an industry run by cargo-cultists; nobody who has ever delivered the cargo is too foul to run off the island.

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

is the guy who directed deuce bigalow too big to throw under the bus?

Lego Movie 2 isn’t out for two weeks, you’d better hurry up if you want to cancel him

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Friday, January 25, 2019 12:12 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

BINGO

Wonder if it was the same for R Kelly.

I don't think it's as complicated as any of these theories.

I think it's more like this: If Singer loses work based on rumours and articles, (or the three lawsuits that I can recall have been dismissed-- Apt Pupil, Michael Egan, John Doe), it leaves the studios that are terminating his employment open to wrongful dismissal suits.

Should a studio fire Singer over these rumours and articles, It may also leave his allegers open to graver suits of defamation-- if any allegations against Singer cause him to lose work, he can cite the lost work as damages incurred in defamation suits against his allegers.

I think it’s pretty easy to not give him more work, Bohemian Rhapsody’s production sounds like it was a debacle and if they can’t point to these allegations they can point to his recent work history.

Meantime...

On a 10-min break halfway through Sundance’s 4-hour Michael Jackson child sex abuse documentary. Whatever you thought you knew or were aware of, the content of this is more disturbing than you could imagine. And again, we’re only halfway through.

— Kevin Fallon (@kpfallon) January 25, 2019

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

There's a lot of discussion of whether artistically or financially Singer merits the protection he's been given

idk, speaking for myself it’s not whether he merits protection or whatever. as also noted above, unwinding existing agreements is thorny. the question I’m asking is why a replacement-value director with heavy baggage keeps getting hired for new projects when there are plenty of replacement-value directors without baggage.

still a lotta MJ defenders I see

xps

don't know what ind of traction #mutemj would get now; curious about how people feel about erasure for bad dead people vs bad living people. Obviously the idea of supporting someone still capable of doing shitty things hits harder logically but are we gonna start backward looking with artistic boycott.

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/music/ryan-adams-women-sex.html

Going to read more but saw that part: Mandy Moore was married to Adams for nearly six years. What she called his psychologically abusive behavior stalled her music career: “He would always tell me, ‘You’re not a real musician, because you don’t play an instrument.’ and yikes.

lots and lots of yikes in there. one of my best friends is a superfan and she is having a hard time with this. :(

http://www.tcj.com/hubris-and-chutzpah-how-lil-abner-kayod-joe-palooka-and-both-their-creators-came-to-grief-part-8/

thanks for posting that -- i've been reading every installment of that al capp/ham fisher story since it started running several weeks ago, it's a fascinating piece of deep reporting with some pretty shocking moments. i recommend starting from the beginning and reading the whole thing if you have some time. i knew capp was an appalling guy but he seems almost evil after reading that stuff.

I've been skipping it bcz I can't tell if it's newly written &/or expanded, or the same version Harvey published in TCJ in the '90s, but I'll dip into this chapter

i don't THINK this is old? i knew most of this story but some of the details are truly fucked up

read this one: seems to be much the same as the old version, except this time treating sexual assault as serious, and not inserting comedy asides about how amusing we all should find the idea of a man with one leg, chasing a teenager around a desk, in the office of people with a duty of care to her

Emma Thompson writes to the producers of "Luck" re their hiring of John Lasseter, who recently left Disney/Pixar following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. https://t.co/Bfxcn2bgNB pic.twitter.com/6ouWBkClpv

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) February 26, 2019

Warner Bros. CEO:

For 15 months, @kimmasters & have been working on this story. Today, we finally hit publish. https://t.co/yfw1ClSB3S via @thr

— Tatiana Siegel (@TatianaSiegel27) March 6, 2019

it’s always ratner

from the cursory read of that that's a very very different situation than the sorts of things we've talked about on this thread. is he accused of abuse in any way? This just sounds like the sort of scuzzy infidelity one assumes happens constantly in hollywood.

This is a weird story - in the sense that I don't even get *why* it's a story. No one comes across well in it, including Charlotte Kirk herself (hell my biggest takeaway from this is... who is Charlotte Kirk?).

I guess this could qualify as a casting couch scenario, but it's undercut by the fact that Kirk herself denies that there was any inappropriate behaviour involved, as well as her own texts, which made her come across as a conniving blackmailer as opposed to a young woman who was taken advantage of (which one could argue she was as well). Plus none of Tsujihara or Ratner's help even mattered in the end, because casting agents and directors just didn't like her enough. It's a gross situation all around but not exactly the bombshell one might expect.

The worst thing about the article is that it makes Brett Ratner seem somewhat reasonable and sane, which is just wrong.

Charlotte Kirk's quotes read like Ratner/et al.'s lawyer was (physically) holding her hostage.

more like her own lawyer wrote them, after a contract with Ratner

Roz: yes, it’s an average casting couch story. The casting couch is a repugnant and exploitative system that should be shamed out of existence.

(it’s fine if people give a leg up to ppl they’ve fucked bcz they like them & wish to see them do well. In this case, the very very bad son of one of the worst people to ever live explicitly pimped out an ex [or current? am on zing, can’t check timeline] to a colleague as a sweetener on a business deal.)

Don't disagree with any of that.

I think I'm just annoyed by the framing/reporting of it - which, considering it took 15 months, makes the abuses of powerful men look more your average sex scandal.

more like*

A federal court of appeals in New York on Monday took the first step in unsealing documents that could reveal evidence of an international sex trafficking operation allegedly run by multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his former partner, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.

The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit gave the parties until March 19 to establish good cause as to why they should remain sealed and, failing to do so, the summary judgment and supporting documents will be made public. The court reserved a ruling on the balance of the documents in the civil case, including discovery materials.

“We’re grateful that the court ruled the summary judgment papers are open and they are moving to expedite having them unsealed,’’ said Sanford Bohrer, the attorney representing the Miami Herald, which filed the motion last year to have the entire case file opened. The Herald’s appeal is supported by 32 other media companies, including the New York Times and Washington Post.

Ghislaine Maxwell was sued for slander after calling Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, a liar. Maxwell, a close associate of Epstein, sought to have documents from the court case remain sealed.
The case, which was settled in 2017, contains more than 1,000 documents, lawyers said during oral arguments in New York on Wednesday. Maxwell is the sole party fighting to keep the case sealed.

https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article227411649.html

Kevin Tsujihara, head of WB, resigned.

Him and Brett Ratner and a minted nobody... what a team

lol @ that idea that James Packer is "a nobody" in business and media

oh my god

david blaine is under investigation. seems to be from his pussy posse days. no surprise.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvey-weinstein-accusers-and-former-board-members-reach-tentative-compensation-deal-11558655485

https://www.thedailybeast.com/max-landis-8-women-accuse-hollywood-filmmaker-of-emotional-and-sexual-abuse-were-not-people-to-him

Oh shit, the Carly Rae Jepsen weirdo?

was unaware of this until now but yes.

horrible read, fuck anyone who enabled this guy's abuse and career