“It was bizarre. … One of the weird things about it was – I don’t know if you remember this – when Chris Conner walks up to Shapiro’s office, he walks up a spiral staircase. Shapiro’s office had a spiral staircase. It looked exactly like that. That was not something I put in the book. That was not something that anyone asked me. It felt eerie to me.
Category: media
The Alternate Reality Of This Year’s Sundance
“The festival threw down a gauntlet. It sent a message to an industry that, to the eyes of many, had failed to uphold with its work the values its members espoused with their politics (or, at least, their campaign donations).”
The Last Time There Were Protests Over The Whiteness Of The Oscars (It Didn’t Go So Well)
“The awards season of 1996 was one of the few times that whiteness made national headlines. There were calls for a boycott, questions about whether a black Oscars host and producer should step down, and disavowals of racism by white Academy members.”
Inside Russia’s Version Of ‘Mad Men’
“Ottepel (The Thaw) is one of the more fascinating descendants of Weiner’s show. To watch it is to step into a parallel universe where a lot of Mad Men‘s themes reappear in a different cultural context, with different characters and stakes.”
The Makers Of ‘Airplane!’ Tell Where They Found All Those Laugh Lines
A Q&A with Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. who insist that they lifted many lines – including “Surely you can’t be serious” and “We need somebody who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner” – directly from old dramatic movies.
Fox’s ‘Grease’ Live Had To Censor Some Famous Lyrics Because Of A Sponsor
“Executive producer Marc Platt told AdWeek that corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola forced the show to tone down some of the language. … That’s how Grease Lightning’s ‘the chicks’ll cream’ became ‘the chicks’ll scream,’ and ‘she’s a really pussy wagon’ became ‘she’s a real dream wagon.'”
The Top Things The Washington Post Learned From Nielsen’s ‘Peak TV’ Numbers
Out of 1400 (fourteen hundred!) TV shows, AMC ended up being one of the big winners: “‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ are gone, but how would AMC even notice? ‘The Walking Dead’ (19.4 million) is the third-most watched show on all of television. The next-highest cable show? Spin-off ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ (11.8 million).”
Disney Animated Movies Taught An Autistic Boy To Speak, And Now There’s A Movie About Him
“We ask parents all the time: What is your child’s passion? And they come up with all sorts of things: dinosaurs, maps, Harry Potter, Thomas the Tank Engine, Star Wars. We’ve surveyed thousands of people with these challenges and most have some video-related affinity. The passion is almost always one of a video nature. They can stop and rewind the images, slow it down and use them like the Dead Sea Scrolls to figure out social interactions; to hold a mirror up to the themselves.”
The Two Newest Breakthrough Stars From This Year’s Sundance
“‘I’m not the boasting type,’ said Mr. Christmas, who lives in Los Angeles. ‘With all these people coming up to me to congratulate me, I started blushing a little bit. I was saying to myself, “Cut it out. Cut it out. Just play it cool.”‘”
The Things We Learned At (And From) Sundance
Nick Jonas is a decent actor, Netflix & Amazon are big players, next year’s Oscars probably won’t be so white and much more.