Category: people

“Triumph is great because where do you go from there? Down. That’s good for comedy.”

“To achieve low budgets while attracting high-caliber actors and directors, Mr. Blum uses an unusual business model. Established directors and stars work for union scale. In success, profits are shared.”

Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History, The Little Friend, and now The Goldfinch: “It’s so long between books for me that the publishing world changes completely every time I’m out, so it’s like I’ve never done it before.”

“I never worked in Hollywood because I had a political conscience. … At 20th Century Fox you had to take a loyalty oath and swear you wouldn’t do anything bad to the United States. I said: ‘Forget it.'”

Builds a performance center, of course: “a 33,000-square-foot center called the Marina Abramovic Institute that is to be the culmination of her life’s work: a place, she says, that can be a Bauhaus for our time, a mecca for artists, scientists and thinkers.”

Academy secretary Peter Englund said in an email Friday that the 82-year-old writer had declined the invitation, and that it’s not yet clear who will represent her at the Dec. 10 award ceremony.

“What could he do that would seem out of place? What could he do that you really wouldn’t expect? … He could show up in oil paintings, on a sitcom, as a Jeopardy! contestant, as the announced star of So Fast & Extra Furious 8, or in hard-core pornography, and nobody would really think it was anything other than a further example of Well, That’s James Franco For You.”

Michael Feinstein, Alan Cumming, Carol Channing and Tommy Tune talk about having their caricatures drawn by the late, great Al Hirschfeld.

He wants to create a “hybrid” between a museum mounting exhibitions geared to a broad general audience, and a gallery that doesn’t have to deal with the complex institutional issues that come with running a nonprofit museum.”

“Harper Lee, the author of the 1960 classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is suing a museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., for what she claims is its improper use of her name and the novel’s title.”