Category: people

“Because when you have a real good story to tell, real good actors, it’s always mainstream. Sometimes in a way it was secret mainstream. But a film like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, made 40 years ago almost, is mainstream today. It was not at the time.” (Also, “I don’t even know what irony exactly is, but I think it’s always hilarious.”)

“An authentication letter from Dickens’s sister-in-law says the author of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol used the toothpick up to his death in 1870.”

The film director (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) sued the neighbors near his country house in Provence for causing “aural and visual pollution and bad odours” by operating an organic chicken farm. The judges were not sympathetic. The suit “was [Scott’s] sixth attempt in five years to thwart his neighbours’ activities.”

The actor confesses that, while on a two-day bender, he told his assistant to bid for an Andy Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor at a Sotheby’s auction. “And to my horror, she did, and even worse, got it.” The price: £2 million. Not to worry: Grant sold the painting six years later for £13 million.

“Even by Domingo’s own workaholic record, his 2009/10 season is action-packed: he has 45 singing and 15 conducting engagements. These don’t include late-scheduled one-offs such as the open-air Christmas concert he will sing in Mexico City – one of his childhood homes – on December 19.”

In the 20 years since the Tiananmen Square protests, he has been transformed into the regime’s favourite artistic son, creative director of the Olympics opening ceremony and the evening show at October’s 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Critics dub him the country’s “artist-in-residence”.

“Mr. Hoving, who died Thursday at age 78, ends one of the most influential and controversial careers in postwar American cultural life. He brought an impresario’s spirit to the job of museum director, turning exhibitions into blockbuster entertainment events notable for their lavishness and sweep, as well as the large crowds who attended them.”

He was “the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show.”

“If you go to inordinate length to explore and discover and bring a world to life, it makes better sense to stay in that world rather than jump in and out of it, which I find exhausting and difficult. That way there isn’t the sense of rupture every time the camera stops; every time you become aware of the cables and the anoraks and hear the sound of the walkie-talkies.”

“In the 80s and early 90s, New York was a place where eccentricity and individuality were absolutely paramount and Quentin epitomised that … It’s not difficult to find people on the British gay scene who find him inspirational but in New York they knew him personally – they’re less focused on ‘icon Quentin’ and more on him as a friend.”